Domain Registration - How to Register A New Domain Name for Your Website

by: Benjamin Chapi

Domain names are site names that provide rememberable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses. Before getting a web site on line you need to have a domain name. These are the familiar web addresses such as yahoo.com that most browsers use to find a particular web site. Domain names, in fact, are pointers to a particular IP address and we use them because they are easier to remember than a series of numbers. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system that stores information associated with domain names in a distributed database on networks, such as the Internet. The DNS is what makes it possible to attach hard-to-remember IP addresses (such as 193.456.28.8.) to easy-to-remember domain names (such as "web-hosting-guide.org")
All websites have an IP address in the form 193.456.28.8. The domain name system translates these numbers into names such as google.com. All domain names are registered in a central registry maintained by InterNIC, a subsidiary of ICANN - the organization which certifies domain name registrars. Domain names are filtered through Domain Name Servers (DNS) which link IP addresses with domain names. Each web site usually has a primary and a secondary DNS – duplicates that increase reliability.

The first step in registering a domain name is to choose it. The name can be almost anything you want, but to be most effective it should reflect the nature of your website. If you are selling scented candles, for example, it helps to have a domain name that has some reference to candles – scented-candles.org.uk for example.

The rules for domain names are simple – only letters, numbers or hyphens are allowed. Other than that, a domain name is limited to 70 characters, but you are advised to keep it as short as possible. Domain names can be upper or lower case – case is ignored by DNS but you can use a combination to make the name more recognizable. Since DNS is case-insensitive, yahoo.com can be advertised as YAHOO.COM.

Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD) name, which is always either one of a small list of generic names (three or more characters), or a two characters territory code. There are several extensions available. The most common is .com - it has even entered common vocabulary as a way to express Internet activity – (I own a dot com business). Other extensions include .biz (for commercial sites), .org (for non-commercial organisations), .net (for organisations involved in Internet infrastructure) and .name (for personal names). There are also extensions with more specialized uses such as .museum, .aero, and .coop and are used exclusively by members of certain organizations. In addition to these common extensions, there can also be a country code extension such as .us (United States) or .uk (United Kingdom). The rules for using country extensions vary, so you need to check with your registrar to see if they are available to you.

All domains must be registered with a registrar that has been certified by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). There are hundreds of registrars and their prices vary considerably. Although registrars are closely regulated, they are permitted to offer their services through third parties; so many web hosts offer a domain name registration service even if they are not a registrar. The price of a domain name will usually be higher when dealing with these third-party services.

Domain names are usually registered for a minimum of one year, although you are permitted to buy up to a 10-year registration contract. Usually the longer the registration contract, the lower the price, so if you are sure you will be on the web for a considerable length of time you can benefit from a longer registration period. Most registrars also offer a discount on bulk purchases. If you own a number of domain names you can save money by transferring them all to the same registrar.


About The Author
Copyright © 2005 Benjamin Chapi. Visit the Web Hosting Guide http://www.web-hosting-guide.org/ for more information about domain names. To find out what your prospects are looking for before you set up a website go to: http://www.uniquekeywords.com/

10 Sensible Steps To Take Before Choosing Your Domain Name

by: Emma Kalson

With such a huge growth in the number of websites and the resulting difficulty in finding an available domain name, it is tempting to grab the first one that sounds like it might do the trick. However, a small amount of homework will pay big dividends – follow the ten steps below to obtain the optimal domain:

1. AVAILABILITY
If it’s not available you can’t have it – simple!

2. COPYRIGHT
Ensure that you do not breach copyright or infringe trademarks with your choice of domain.

3. EXTENSIONS
It’s widely acknowledged that the best TLD (top level domain) is .com. However, in the UK, web users are more than used to .co.uk so this is equally acceptable for UK websites. If .com isn’t available and you use .net instead (for example), check that .com isn’t either a competitor or that the .com site content is acceptable! Always try to get the .com, your country TLD or .net in that order. Web users are still not used to .biz or .info.

4. BE GREEDY!
If more than one TLD variant is available, buy as many as you can afford and set them all to point to your website. This is a form of brand protection and prevents unscrupulous competitors trying to cash in on your hard-earned web traffic.

5. BE MEMORABLE
Make sure that potential web users will remember your domain name and that they can spell it properly.

6. BE PRONOUNCABLE
Try telling people your web address over the phone – can they understand what you tell them? Or do they give up and try someone else’s website.

7. BE DESCRIPTIVE
If you are a new business, very few people will remember or search for your domain name if it is your company name. Try choosing a domain name that is descriptive of your products instead e.g. cheap>.com. Try testing it with a hyphen as well as using just one word.

8. OFFLINE MARKETING
Use your domain name in your offline marketing literature and ensure that it is as visible as possible. However, if your domain name consists of more than one word, that isn’t hyphenated, try using capital letters e.g. which is easier to read – littlefishwebdesign.com or LittleFishWebDesign.com? Domain names are not case sensitive so your clients will find your site whichever version they use.

9. BUY YOUR DOMAIN FOR LONGER
Search engines are now looking at less obvious information such as how long you have bought your domain name for. Domain names owned for less than two years are though to be penalised, so buy your domain for as long as possible.

10. OWN YOUR DOMAIN NAME
If you use a web designer or third party for your domain names, ensure they are registered in your name and that you have a signed agreement with the company that they will release all the details (including password) to you, quibble free, if you choose to move to another design or hosting company.


About The Author
Emma Kalson is the owner of www.littlefishwebdesign.com and has been designing websites for about 10 years. She doesn’t believe in unnecessary bells and whistles on websites and wants to help remove some of the myths surrounding website design and search engine activity.

Choosing an Effective Domain Name

by: Martin Bradley

Effective Domain Names
Choosing an effective domain name is just as important as choosing a company name or even the line of business itself. There are a number of guidelines that you must adhere to that we will look at, but apart from those, you have total control and artistic license to create whatever domain name you wish. But will it work for you, or against you.

The Guidelines

1. Domain names must contain a minimum of two characters but no more than 67.
Nobody in there right mind should want to use 67 characters in their name. The more memorable your domain name is the easier it will be to remember it. Not exactly rocket science is it? Also people don’t want to type long addresses, especially if they are hard to spell. There’s nothing worse than having to look at every character in a long, hard to spell address to make sure you have spelled it correctly, only to find its wrong and you have to type it in all over again. So in my opinion, short and easy to remember and spell domain names are the best to use.

2. Domain names are not case sensitive, so http://www.myname.com/ is the same as http://www.myname.com/.
This is true, but reading capitalised text is harder to read than lower case. Also the use of capitalised text on the internet is classed as shouting, and nobody likes to be shouted at.

3. Domain names can contain letters, numbers and hyphens, but no spaces. Also you can’t use hyphens as the first or last characters of your domain.

This is personal preference. Let’s take three names as examples.

A. http://www.bullbreedwebdesign.com/
As you can see this is quite hard to read. You can’t really tell where one word stops and another one starts. Don’t make your customer work too hard to find your website.

B. http://www.bullbreed_web_design.com/
This is quite easy to read and hyphenating in this way is often used. The only problem I have with this is that you have to press the shift key to achieve the correct hyphen. You may think I’m being a little silly here but remember to cater for all users. Not everyone is computer or keyboard literate. Make things as easy as possible.

C. http://www.bullbreed-web-design.com/
This is very easy to read. The hyphens separate the text very well, and you don’t have to use the shift key to achieve the desired hyphen, less work for the customer.
Product Name or Company Name

This isn’t an easy one to answer. If your organisation offers a multitude of products or services, your company name may be more effective. If you only have one product or service you may wish to use this as your domain. You could if you wanted too use two domains. ‘your-company-name.com’ could point to your index page and ‘your-product-name.com’ could point to your product description page. Domain name companies usually offer discounted rates for bulk domain orders so this may be the way for you.

Keyword Domain Names
Domain names containing keywords applicable to your industry will help the customer to identify what your line of business is. Also in search engines such as Yahoo, if your domain name contains keywords that you have in your title tag, you could achieve slightly higher rankings.

Use of Numbers
The use of numbers in your domain name can help your website when being included in directories. More often than not, directories list your website numerically and alphabetically. Also numbers can psychologically influence your customer into thinking you are the best. For example, ‘http://www.1st-website-design.com/’ could possibly list you high within directories and can lead your customer into thinking you are number 1. On the other hand, ‘http://www.0downloads.com/’ or http://www.0money-lenders.com/ doesn’t really instil confidence.

OK, there you go. As you can see it’s well worth thinking hard about your domain name. It can either reflect professionalism, instil confidence and be used as part of an effective marketing campaign. Or make you look really crappy. The choice is yours.
Good luck

About The Author
Martin Bradley is the Creative Director at Bullbreed Design Studio. The company provides Website Design, Hosting and Corporate Identity Packages.

What is a domain name and why would I want one?

by: Ewan Bain

In this article we will cover the basics of what a domain name is, how they work and why you need to have at least one. I am going to try and avoid complicated computer terms and stick to explanations that should be easily understood by someone without a computer science degree.

What is a Domain Name? Before we can go into what a domain name is I'm going to tell you why we need them as the answers compliment each other. The Internet is just a really big collection of connected computers (a network). For the purpose of explaining domain names you can think of the Internet a bit like the phone system and just like the phone system every computer on the Internet has it's own phone number except an Internet phone number is called an IP addresses. This address is made up of up to 12 digits in the form 123.123.123.123, computers use these IP addresses to send information to each other over the Internet.

When the Internet was first created it quickly became clear that these IP addresses were not easy to remember and another method was need to make these addresses more human friendly. The solution to this was the Domain Name System (DNS). Basically the DNS is a really really big phone book for computers. When you type a web site address into your web browser it checks the DNS for that website name and finds the IP address. Once it has the IP address it can then send a message to that computer and ask it for the web page you wanted.

Ok so you know a domain name is part of a web site address but which part? Lets look at a website address so we can identify and discuss what bit of it is a domain name. http://www.itxcel.com/index.html
The above address is the home page of the itXcel web site. It can be split into 3 main parts. The first part is http:// this just tells your web browser what kind of information it is going to get and how to get it. The last part is /index.html this is name of the files on the remote computer that you want your browser to get. The bit in the middle www.itxcel.com is a domain name. This is the name that your computer sends to the DNS to get back the IP address.

So you know what a domain name is and that there is a phone book called the DNS to change your easy to remember domain name into an IP address that you computer can understand. The Internet phone book (DNS) is special in that everyone on the Internet needs to be able to use it. This makes the DNS very very big (100+ million addresses big). Due to the size of this phone book it needed to have a carefully organised and managed structure.

Domain names themselves are split into different levels like a hierarchy. The DNS system uses this hierarchy to search the DNS for the IP address of the domain name it is trying to find. The last bit of a domain, in the previous example the com part is called the top level domain. There are a large selection of top level domains like com, net, org and info. There are also very similar endings called country level domains like uk and de. Each of the top level and country level domains are managed by a different organization, sometimes these are companies or non profit organizations and sometimes governments. In the domain business these organisations are referred to as the registries. Each registry looks after it's own part of the domain name system.

If you decide you want to use a domain name in the top level domain com, like mycompany.com you would have to have this name assigned by the registry that manages that top level domain (for .com a US company called VeriSign). The process of being assigned a domain name is called domain registration.

Domain registration is more like a lease than a purchase. You are renting the second level domain (the mycompany bit) from Verisign for a specific amount of time normally between 1 and 10 years at a time. Most of the organizations that allow you to register a second level domain charge a fee for each year that you register the domain for. With almost all domain names you are also given the option to renew your registration (lease) when it is close to running out (expiring).

Once you have registered a second level domain you are free to create as many third level domains (sometimes called sub domains) as you like. In our previous example the www is a sub domain of itxcel.com

Most of the registries that manage these top level domain names do not allow individuals or businesses to register domains directly with them. To register a domain you need to use a company like itXcel. We act as a registrar and send all the required information and the registration fee to the registry. Registrars are useful as they hide the differences that exist in each of the registries from the customer and provide a simple step by step process for registering a domain. A registrar also allows you to manage and track all your domains from one place rather than having to deal with a different company for each top level domain.

OK so I know what a domain name is, Why do need one? Can you image what a nightmare it would be if you had an email address like myname@123.246.128.255 or a web site address http://123.246.128.255/. These addresses are possible but not very easy to remember. Now if you register a domain name you could create an email address like myname@mycompany.com and a web site address like http://mycompany.com These are much easier to remember and look 100 times more professional.

One of the important points about registering a domain is that once done you have an exclusive right to use that domain for as long as you keep the domain registered in your name. If you do not renew a domain at the end of it's registration period it will again become available for registration by someone else. For this reason even if you don't want or need a web site at the moment, it's still a good idea to register a domain as soon as possible. Just imagine if your competition registered the domain name of your company or product. Although there is a process in place to retrieve these domain it can be long and complicated. It is definitely simpler to spend a little money up front to secure your chosen domain names.

To find out what domains are available and to quickly and cheaply register them visit http://www.itxcel.com now and enter your desired name in the domain search box.


About The Author
Ewan Bain is the general manager at itXcel Internet Limited - Based in the UK itXcel provide Internet services, including domain name registration and web site hosting to small to medium sized businesses and home users.