The Domain name, basically speaking, is that section of the Web
Address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that you find between the
www. and the .com. You can have your own domain name ( TLD - Top
Level Domain) i.e.. www.yourname.com or a virtual or secondary domain
name i.e.. www.yourname.webhost.com. In this case the main domain
name is "webhost" who would probably be the name of the ISP (Internet
Service Provider) who is hosting your site.
This, almost invariably indicates that you are getting your web
hosting service free of charge. The web host is making money either
by placing ads on your site, or, especially in the UK, (where one
usually has to pay the phone company to access the Internet) taking a
percentage of the actual call costs from the telephone company.
This is fine for a personal home page or a local club or society page
(the first site I designed was for my local golf club and is
www.wsmgolfclub.fsnet.co.uk - where the service provider is
Freeserve, indicated by the "fsnet" part of the url.).
If however you are running a commercial site of any kind, you do need
to have your own domain name. If you are obviously using a free
hosting site, it does not say a great deal to your visitors and
potential customers about the professionalism of your company.
Furthermore, some of these free hosting domain names become rather
long and therefore difficult to remember or to type in the search box
without making a mistake.
There are many sites on the net that will tell you if your desired
name is available and will register it for you. The one I use is
Register.com and I find their service efficient and their prices
competitive.
Short or Long Name ? You are now able to register a name up to 63
characters long and some people suggest that if you choose a long
name packed with keywords it will help your search engine rankings.
Personally, I am not so sure about their benefit. Whilst there might
be some advantage in gaining a higher search engine listing, I think
that this is outweighed by the disadvantages. First, as Yahoo or
Amazon have proved, a long name with lots of keywords isn't necessary
for success! Neither name indicates what the sites do, but they are
probably two of the best known sites both on and off the Internet -
having a short, snappy, memorable name is far more important.
Conversely, if your name is too long, people will not remember it and
therefore not come back to your site -
buyallyourbookscdscomputergamesatcutpricesfromouronlineshopnow.com
does not exactly trip off the tongue as well as Amazon.com!
Finally, on a purely practical point, when you are running your
business, you will be amazed at how often you need to type in your
web address - I am beginning to think that mine is too long and that
is less than half the maximum allowed!
Unless you have the marketing budget of an Amazon though, I do agree
that it is preferable to have your domain name related to your
business so that people do know what your site is about before
visiting it.
Is dot com important? Once you have decided on a name, your next task
is to establish whether the name is still available as a .com . If it
isn't, you could try .org, .net, .to, .tv etc. etc... - you are
probably wondering what these letters represent. Well, in a nutshell,
there are a few global domains, such as .com (denoting a
company) .org - a charity or organisation - .gov - a government
department and then there are country domains i.e.. .co.uk - United
Kingdom - .tv - Tuvalu (where? - don't ask me!) - .to - Tonga - .cx -
Christmas Islands and so on.
Whilst originally, each country was supposed to use its domain name
for its own residents, many of the smaller countries such as Tuvalu
and Tonga are selling the rights to their domain names - and who can
blame them? If you were a manufacturer of televisions or a programme
producer, wouldn't you like your domain to end in .tv?
Anyway, I digress, the point is that you can now get your own domain
name registered with any of these domain endings. And if you are UK
based, try All UK Domains.
However, despite all the alternatives, I do believe that "dot com"
has become part of the vocabulary, indicating any kind of web site,
the same way as hoover has now become a verb, meaning to vacuum and a
generic noun for all vacuum cleaners. So if you can, try and get a
suitable "dot com " domain but if not, don't worry too much, as you
can see, there are plenty of alternatives.
By Tony Murtagh
=======================================
Tony Murtagh has spent all his career involved in sales, sales
management, marketing and PR. He was a UK National Sales Manger
(Major Accounts) for a mobile communications company, had his own
publishing company producing a monthly Business to Business magazine
and has acted as a PR consultant for a number of small businesses. He
is now sharing his wide experience of sales, marketing and promotion
in his new web site: -
http://DevelopYourWebSiteAndYourself.com
and in a weekly e-ezine Aardvark Marketing, which you can subscribe
to from the site, or
mailto:AardvarkMarketing-subscribe@...