Good domain name propels business on Web

I can’t stress enough the need for small businesses to brand themselves by securing a meaningful Web address (also called a domain name). A domain name brands your business and ties your website, email and other aspects of online communication together. Even community organizations and individuals can benefit from having a stake on the Web.

There’s nothing complex about securing your own domain name. The first step is to find a company, called a registrar, that will register your domain name with the national and international powers that be. Simply search for “domain registration” in your favorite search engine and you’ll see plenty of options. We’ll look at selection criteria later, but all will let you check the availability of your proposed domain name.

Watch a video of how to create a Web domain at www.screencast.com/t/dlksn77UhDR.

The next thing you need to do is come up with a unique domain name. There are two parts to a domain name you need to be concerned with: the label, which comes after the www and the extension, which I call the suffix (.com, .net, etc.). The label can be up to 60 characters long and contain letters, numbers and hyphens; other characters are not allowed. The extension comes from a list approved by an international standards organization. There is no difference between upper- and lower-case letters.

The challenge becomes finding a label that represents you, your business or your organization. With the explosive growth of the Internet, securing a domain such as smithplumbing, firstbaptistchurch or johnsmith will be next to impossible. Luckily you can get pretty creative. Conventional wisdom has been to keep your domain name short. But people have become more accepting of longer names as long as they’re easy to remember.

Creativity can breed confusion, though. For example, let’s assume your business name is Muffins for You. If you’re lucky you can register muffins foryou.com. But what if that’s not available? You might be able to register with a different extension such as muffinsforyou.biz or .net (or one of dozens of others). However, many experts believe people tend to enter the .com extension without thinking. This could lead people to the wrong website or — even worse — emails delivered to the wrong person.

If you feel strongly about having a .com domain extension, get creative with the label. You could try muffins-for-you, muffins4you, muffins4u and so on until you find one that’s available. But you’ll have to manage your marketing to ensure your clients and prospects get to your site.

On the other end of the spectrum, if your business has a unique name you may find that registering multiple domains makes sense. My business name, Byte Slaves was easy to claim. But people don’t always know how to spell it. So in addition to byteslaves.com, I registered byte-slaves.com, biteslaves.com and a few others. To avoid confusion, I also registered all these domains with .net and .biz extension.

One last thought about names: You may even consider creating (or modifying) your business name so it is unique to begin with. This makes finding the perfect domain name much easier.

When you’ve selected your domain name, it’s time to register it. It’s fairly common to have it registered and hosted in the same place (hosting provides a place to store your website, email and other components of your site). National companies such as GoDaddy and Register.com — to mention just two — offer a full range of services that can be upgraded and modified as needed.

It is often expedient to enlist the help of a Web designer or other professional to help with the registration process. But you need to be careful at this point. When registering your domain, you are required to provide the registrant (owner), administrative and technical contact information. You want to be sure a company owner is listed as the registrant and someone else within the company as administrative contact. Otherwise you may lose control of your domain. If you need to transfer your domain or make other changes to your hosting, approval from one of these people is required.

I’ve seen too many people who have entrusted Web designers or marketers with the registration of their sites, only to find these folks disappear along with access to their sites.

For more information, view informative videos on our YouTube channel (youtube.com/user/byteslaves). You can also send questions to focus@byteslaves.com or post to our Facebook page, facebook.com/byteslavescomputing.