Building Your First Website: Day 3

Posted on January 7th, 2009 by Urbain

In day 3 of this series that is written especially for non-technical mom and pop business owners or other newcomers to the web, we’ll take a look at selecting a domain name.

A domain name is the name of your website. For example: www.YourSite.com.

In days 1 and 2, you identified what your website is about and outlined what you intend to be presenting online. In doing so, you should have been able to define a one or two sentence mission statement. Knowing exactly what your site is about is critical in selecting your domain.

When selecting a domain, you can either get the name of your business; i.e., ArizonaMountainGoats.com or something that has to do with your business that is based on your mission statement; i.e., TheAntiqueExpert.com.

The most reasonably priced service that I have used, which has a nice interface that allows you to set up nameservers (we’ll talk about that later) and so forth is www.GoDaddy.com. Generally speaking, you can buy a domain for around $8.00 per year at www.GoDaddy.com . When buying a domain from them, buy the domain only. There will be prompts for all sorts of other services; all you will need is your domain name.

If you are having trouble coming up with a domain name, check out the Nameboy Domain Name Generator. At Nameboy, you can enter in a main keyword or an alternate keyword and it will show a number of suggestions.

What Extension is Best?

If at all possible, get a .com extension for a commercial site. For some reason, a “com” site URL is more memorable and carries a bit more value if you want to sell it down the road. The other extensions — .net, .org, .mobi, .info, .us, .biz and .tv — are fine but if at all possible, you are much better off going with the .com extension. If you think competition is going to be a problem, or that your domain name is valuable, you might want to buy all of the extensions available so that you have exclusive claim (i.e., Blurbosphere.com, Blurbosphere.net, Blurbosphere.biz and so on).

What About Hyphens?

There are some people who say that hyphens will diminish the value of your website in the eyes of the search engines. That has not been my experience at all. Let’s say that your business is called Williams & Sons Fine Linens and just about every domain with those words has been taken. Setting up a domain name such as Williams-Sons-Linens.com will work, and people should be able to remember it. Of course, if you can avoid hyphens, do so.

Other Considerations.

Particularly if you are creating an online store front for an existing mom and pop business, be sure to get something that is memorable. I had a client who insisted on having a long keyphrase and of course, no one could remember her site. Without using her specific URL, an example of what she wanted was:

mypropertyinthestateofarizonaisforsale.com.

In advertising copy, this could be written as:

MyProperyInTheStateOfArizonaIsForSale

so that the domain name makes a bit more sense, but people are still going to have trouble with it.

Fortunately, I found a short name that people could remember and we set up a redirect, using it. For you, the first time web owner, try getting the best domain you can think of right now. This is something you’re going to have to live with for awhile, so make sure you’re comfortable with it.

Day 3 Conclusion.

You’ll be finding and purchasing a domain name. Don’t bother buying all the other services listed by the domain registrars. Tomorrow we’ll talk about hosting services that are better than those provided by the registrars.