What's in the name (Domain Name) ?

Since you've finally decided to build a website, the first thing you need to do is think of a name or rather several alternatives of a name. For a business website, you will obviously want the name of your business; for a hobbyist you'd probably want a name of your hobby attached, such as coin collector. There are several things that you may want to think about before deciding on a name.

1. If your hobby is coin collection as of now, it may not be wise to get a name such as coincollector.com because after a few years, if you want to expand your hobby, coincollector.com will not fit in. It would thus be smarter to go for a generic name or your own very name as a website address. If you are a business, you have far less of a chance of change in a name. For example, if you are called Shree Riddhi Siddhi Computers, it would probably be easy to get the same name, but be ready for a slight alteration if you don't.

2. Getting/deciding on a name can get to be difficult. Understand that Internet has no boundaries and therefore every English dictionary name you think of is probably already taken such as coincollector.com. Also, having a .com address, which is long, can get difficult and frustrating to type in. Like missing out a "d" in Riddhi Siddhi will give an error and most novice users will probably not understand the problem.

3. If you cannot get a name in a .com form, don't fret as not all addresses end in .com. You can look at several alternatives such as .org, .net, .in, .co.in, etc. The cost of each of these may vary.

4. You don't need a web designer to tell you what name you can or cannot choose. You can choose this from a wonderful little site called DomainTyper.com which very clearly explains what site name you can or cannot take. If you really like the name you've chosen but cannot find a .com, .net, or .org name, click on the "Add Extension" next to it where you can choose a different extension altogether.

Practically speaking, there is really no difference in .com, .net, or .org name these days. Search engines don't discriminate between a .com address and a .net address. The .com addresses are just the most popular domain extensions and therefore the Internet is thought of as "dot com". As a rule, go for .com first and if it is taken, try for others.

Buying space
Yes, just like you need space for your office, you need space for your website too. It's measured in MB's and GB's here and not in width, height and depth.

There are various places you can buy space from. However, it's best left upto your web designer/company you are getting this through. If you want a general cost structure for buying space and domain name, is will cost you about Rs.150 per month or more. Here are a few popular hosts that offer webhosting for your website. Each host has several offers/goodies to offer. I will not go into this as it is beyond the scope of this article. However, be careful of webhosts that claim unlimited space and bandwidth. There are no free lunches and unlimited generally means that there is a limit but most small websites will not exceed it. However, once you do, you'll be asked to pay for a higher package or move to another host. Don't worry. The unlimitedness threshold is quite high such as 6GB for space or more and 500GB or more for bandwidth. Also, Linux webhosting is cheaper than Windows.

lunarpages
Bluehost
Hostgator

Want to make your basics stronger?
If you are really technologically-challenged you need to read this. My completely technologically-challenged uncle asked me certain questions I never even thought about. He couldn't understand what the internet was or what a website really is. So, here are some of the questions and answers that I came across.

What is the Internet?
As per Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) , "The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers, enabling users to share information along multiple channels." Basically, for something like an Internet, you need several people who have computers hooked up to each other through wires to send and receive data.

This is what the internet would look like when visualized with colour codes. Original higher size is available at Wikipedia Internet Map.

It is pretty much like a club called the Internet and several people joining in (logging in) to send other club members some information. In order to facilitate faster communication and exchange of services, certain members are rich enough to have big information centres (called servers) that can share info for certain exchange of information from you. This is, of course, a very simplistic explanation and I'm sure many of you are already raising your eyebrows. I cannot discuss this in detail here, do hop on to Wikipedia entry on Internet for better information. If you are interested in actually seeing a better visual representation of how Internet network looks, see World Wide Web Around Wikipedia.

What is URL/Internet address? I already have an office address.
URL/address is being referred to as a location where your website is or will be. You cannot just say "Go to the Internet and see what we are offering." It's like saying "Go to Andheri and you'll find the Techtree office." You need to specify where you need to go exactly and there cannot be landmarks for websites either, you cannot say it's next to the Wikipedia website. The URL address is something like www.techtree.com, which is equivalent to giving exact address to someone to reach your office.

What is a website?
Just as you've an office site/space where you sit, your internet office sits where your website is.

I don't want my competitor to see my website
In business, you can avoid to show your competitor your offerings, but you cannot so that on a website as you do not have control over who comes to see your website. Internet has no boundaries -- anyone, anywhere can come see your offerings and probably copy or offer something better. You can limit your website to a closed set of people with a password protection. However, this defeats the purpose of a website, plus you need to have a real solid offering for someone to really want to get included in such an elitist club.

Designing a Website
Before you skip this, I'm not getting into the technical details here. I will just take you through the thought process that you need undertake when you want to build your own website. Yes, even if you hire a web designer and it's his job to do this, it will help and reduce a lot of heartache if you streamline your thought before you go to explain him what you want.

1. Design for easy reading across webpages. Nothing should interfere with the readability of the webpage, that's the only way you can communicate with your audience. You may like red colour, but, please don't paste it across the entire webpage as it makes readability difficult; use white instead as it's the most readable and professional to look at.

2. Don't try any stupid cheap tricks to fool the search engines. In the past, web designers have developed nefarious methods in an attempt to get higher rankings in the search engines such as repeating several words in the same page, putting invisible text, etc. Gone are those days. Trying to fool Google (the king of search engines) will get your website banned.

3. Forget silly under construction pages. If you don't have anything there, just don't put anything there at all. No one wants to go to an under-construction page. It's like announcing a new road and then saying, "Oh it's under construction come later".

Webology
Domain
A domain identifies a computer or computers on the Internet. The name appears as a Web site URL, e.g. www.techtree.com. A domain needs to be registered on domain name registrars such as the popular three mentioned earlier.

Subdomain
In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, "mail.example.com" or "calendar.example.com" are subdomains of the "example.com" domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the ".com" top-level domain (TLD).
Source - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdomain

ICANN
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, U.S., ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on Sept. 18, 1998. ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses.
Find out more here.

TLD
A top-level domain (TLD), sometimes referred to as a top-level domain name, is the last part of an Internet domain name, i.e.; the group of letters that follow the final dot of any domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is .com. Read more here.

Cyber Squatting
Cyber Squatting is the registration of a well-known brand or company name as an Internet domain name in the hope of selling it at a later date for an exorbitant amount. This is considered an offence and is a crime.