citations - How should I cite a website URL?

I am currently writing a report and I have been compiling a list of references (from IEEE mostly) and I also have a number of websites.

My question is, what is the best way to note a website URL? Would it be to reference and cite a URL, would it be adding a footnote? An example would be a reference to google.com. Would it be the correct to just create a footnote?

I've started to just add a footnote each time a website is mentioned (using LaTeX) so for example if a javascript plugin is mentioned then a footnote would be added to the website URL. How would be best to do this as it would not suffice as a reference as it is just noting a website for further reading. I do not have time to waste be writing the whole report to then have to go back through and edit the document hence my question.

Answer

I suppose the easiest way would be to use the \newcommand command in LaTeX.

Put something like this before your \begin{document}:

\newcommand{\jquerynote}{\footnote{\url{http://jquery.com}}~}

Use it as follows.

We used JQuery\jquerynote to build the user interface.

If you want to change the reference to a citation or another format, you can replace the contents of the \newcommand

As far as to "What is the best way to cite a website URL?" the answer generally is that there isn't a standard. Personally, I use web sites as a citation if it contributes some kind of important intellectual argument to the paper. If I use web sites as a footnote, it's because it has to do with some kind of tool I used and is there simply to inform the user that I used Tool XYZ.

Using your example, if I said in my paper, "We used the Google search engine to identify evidence of bias in search engine results" I'd probably put that as a footnote, whereas if I said, "Company web sites from Google, Microsoft, and Apple about employment all state that having fun at work is important" may be citations.

(I should finally note that this is a personal convention rather than anything spelled out in a styleguide, but maybe it helps you?).