Okay so you want to create a website but where do you start?

The first thing you’re going to need is a Domain Name, something like www.mycooldomainname.com

The domain name is the address of your website and it will be used for directing traffic (people) to your site.

Normally the domain name is formed in three parts, but you only choose two of the three parts.

part1.part2.part3 = www.domainname.com

But before you go rushing to buy www.iwanttobethenextgoogle.com you need to think about it for a minute. What is the website going to be used for,  is it you / your company / your passion / your mum ?

It’s likley that the domain name will be in use for a long time to come and so you should consider some things before deciding on the name.

1) Make the name easy to remember, generally short names are better.

2) Ensure the name cannot be spelt, or worded in different ways. For example www.were.com could also be where.com or wear.com, also stay away from numbers combinations like the 411.com could also be fouroneone.com. Think about the people coming to your site, you don’t want to have to explain that 411 is the numbers 411.

3) If your domain name is not something fixed like your company name, you should consider including keywords in it. For example if you own a pet shop based in essex you may want to choose www.petshopessex.com

4) Sometimes unique domain names can be used to your advantage, names like google, twittter, facebook, myspace. But remember that these names only become popular with branding, advertising and the public awareness.

5) You can’t use special characters in your domain name like#@¬$, but you can use hyphens – which act like a word spacer. Search engines can read sperate words even if they are not seperated by hyphens www.thenextbigthing.com is okay and so is www.the-next-big-thing.com

6) Once you have found a domain name you will need check that someone else has not already registered it. To  see if the name you have chossen is available type it in here:

Now that you have selected a name you need to choose the TLD (top level domain) for it, the is the part 3 of the website address, the .com bit. I would always recommend registering a .com in conjuction with another name that maybe more appropriate if you were regisitering a name for a charity it would be a good idea to register www.yourcharity.com & www.yourcharity.org and if you can afford it I would register all available TLD’s as this will help protect you brand in the future.

Note that the TLD’s have some restrictions on who can register what and what for, they can be only registered for a minimum fixed term of 1 year and some TLD’s such at .co.uk can only be registered for a minimum of two years.

I hope this article helps with deciding on your domain name, I’d really appericate your comments or suggestions for improvement.

See Part 2 – The Web Hosting