Domain Names

Domain names are so cheap, they should be considered essential.

You can use them to:

• Shorten and tidy up your company website address
• Have a more professional looking email address
• Make it easier to advertise and for people to remember your web address
• By having more than one, you can target and track your advertising

The rest of this article is here inside the private area

Domain Names - advanced

Have you read the Basic Domain Names post first?

Ultimately, your domain name is part of your marketing strategy and should be thought out accordingly.

Continued in the private area.

Registering Domain Names

Having decided on a domain name, there are two main things you need to do:

• Register the domain name
• Point the domain name to your target website

There are countless companies on the web for registering domain names. The one I always use is freeparking. They're not the cheapest but they are good, quick, professional and reliable and give you great control over your domain.

You can get cheaper but some of them may not be as reliable or fully featured.

On the freeparking site, you can see if a domain is available and then register it. Once it's registered, simply go to the maintenance section and enter the web address that the domain should point to.

You will receive emails as the set up progresses and your domain will go live within hours (typically) although it could be up to 24 hours.

If you choose the domain www.mydomain.com for example, you can also set up email forwarding. This means that as well as having a website, you automatically have a corresponding email address anything@mydomain.com - any email to this address will be forwarded to a regular email address you choose.

So instead of having to put john@aol.com for example, you can use john@mydomain.com. All email will then automatically be forwarded to john@aol.com