Website 101: Your domain

Photo by Andreas Weilguny on Unsplash

Before you start building your website, you need a place for it to live.

An address; a home; a plot of land. Your own small slice of the massive internet.

That’s where a domain comes in.

YourNameHere.com

Once you’ve purchased a domain, as long as you continue to pay the (modest) yearly registration fee, you own it forever. No one can take it from you. That’s a major advantage in this transitory internet world. And you can point it to whatever website you currently operate.

Choosing a domain

The most obvious domain for you would be YourName.com. But if you have a common name, that is probably already taken. So you might have to get a bit creative. Some things to keep in mind when choosing a domain:

• Keep it short. The shorter the better, since it’s easier to remember and type. But the problem with that is that the shorter the domain, the more likely it’s already taken.

• Avoid numbers and hyphens. When I tell people about my business domain, lucky8ball.com, I always have to say, “The number 8, not the spelled-out word 8.” That’s an extra step and a potential source of confusion.

• Make it memorable. Despite the 8 problem, my domain is good because it’s unusual and memorable. That makes a difference.

• Use industry terms. For example, if you are a realtor with a common name, YourNameRealty.com is a possibility. Keywords in a domain can help with search engine optimization too.

• Stick with .com. There are a lot of other domain “extensions,” which is the part after the “dot” in a domain name. But they are much less used, and your content will be easier to find with .com.

Buying a domain

There are a lot of places you can buy a domain, and the prices are similar wherever you go. Expect to pay less than $20/year for a single domain.

My main advice is to buy a domain from a domain registrar, and keep it separate from where you host your website (I will talk about hosting next week). You want to make it as easy as possible to change where the domain is pointed. It might seem easier to get a domain from the place where you buy your website hosting, but don’t do that. It makes changing things more difficult than it needs to be.

The domain registrar I recommend highly is Hover.com. What sets Hover apart is their fantastic customer service. The thing about support for tech topics like domains and web hosting is that you rarely need it. But when you need it, you *really* need it. And they have it, in spades. Chat and even phone, which is rare these days. Highly recommended.

More domain advice

• Don’t hesitate to speculate. I own lots of domains (probably too many) that I haven’t used for projects yet. That is no problem. They are cheap and you never know. (I own the domain godzillahorse.com for some reason.)

• Make sure you are paid up. There’s nothing worse than letting your domain expire by accident. Pay for multiple years if you can, and set up your account for automatic renewal. You can always let domains go if you want to in the future. But if they expire when you didn’t expect it, someone else could come along and snap it up.

• Think about social media. You might want to have the same handle on your social media accounts as you do on your domain. And be sure to consider all the ways you can list and promote your domain on social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc.

Next week, I will talk about selecting the platform for your personal website. It’s a huge topic but I will try to hit the high points.

Hearing from you

Do you own any domains already? If so, which ones? And what do you use them for?

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If you missed last week’s issue on why you need a personal website, here it is: