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.
Echoing the comments and other answers, citing a website is no different to citing any other resource, such as a book, or a paper. Depending on your favorite text editor and reference manager, you would like to produce bibliographic entries, such as


  ... for the implementation of the prototype, we used the Ruby programming language [23] and ...
  ...
  ...
  Bibliography
  ...
  23. Matsumoto, Yukihiro. Ruby Programming Language. http://www.ruby-lang.org/, 2009.


In BibTeX, there's @misc entry for that. You would use it as follows:

@misc{links/Java,
        author = {{Sun Microsystems Inc.}},
        title = {{J}ava{\texttrademark} {P}latform, {S}tandard {E}dition 6},
        howpublished={\url{http://java.sun.com/}},
        month{jun},
        year = {2006}
}

 @misc{links/xml,
        author = {{W3C}},
        title = {{Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0}},
        howpublished = {\url{http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/}},
        publisher = {World Wide Web Consortium},
        year = {2008},
        month = {November}
}


Since websites are a dynamic resource, you should always include the date (year/month) of the last retrieval. 

For the url, the code above would assume \usepackage{url}.

Another technical issue with this is whether your chosen bibliography style would include the URL in the reference, or not. You might want to consult this questions at tex.SE