Reserve Your Domain Name:
Your domain name and the name of your website
should be the same because you want people to easily remember who you are
and how to find you. It will be easier to reserve the domain name first
and then name your business the same thing.
Your domain name can be up to 67 characters
long, so make it as descriptive as possible. You can use hyphens in your
domain name but try to use just one because some people will forget to put
it in.
If a domain is taken you may be able to add
"the" or "my" to the beginning of it. However, I would not recommend
making it plural and adding an "s".
If the domain you want is only available
under another extension such as .net and .org you may want to consider
using it. However, the search engines seem to rank the .com sites before
the other extensions. If you have to go with something other than .com
make sure you promote your business using the full domain name so people
wont get confused and go to .com instead.
You want to get your domain name BEFORE you
do anything else. You want to build your business around the domain name
and not try to fit a domain name to an existing website or an existing
business.
I highly recommend Network
Solutions/VeriSign for reserving your domain name. They have been around
for a long time and they're one of the largest in the business.
Reserving your domain with them is simple:
1. Go to their site and search for an
available domain
2. Pay for a one-year reservation ($35)
Click below to reserve your domain name.
After you hire a hosting company for your
website, you will contact Network Solutions and tell them to point your
domain name to your website address at the hosting company.
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Hiring a Website Hosting Company
Don't go with the free web host. They
put advertising banners on your site, they don't give you enough server
space, it can be difficult to quickly update your site, also the free hosts
often include their name in your domain name so it makes your site look
unprofessional.
Your web host should provide the following:
- 99% up time or better
- at least 10GB of bandwidth transfer (the
movement of your data from the web host servers to your visitors browser)
- at least 200MB of disk space (most sites only
use about 5MB but if your building shopping mall site it could get pretty
big)
- 24/7 tech support; never chose a host that
doesn't have tech support on the weekends or on holidays. (make sure you
sign up with the main company and not with one of their resellers; sometimes
the resellers are just salesmen and don't perform timely tech support)
- SSL (secure server) this is needed if you
plan to process credit card information
- control panels for making changes to your
account; (stay away from hosts that make you contact them to create new
email accounts, change passwords or make other admin changes)
We recommend using PowerWeb as a web
host. They offer an abundance of features at an affordable price.
- 99.5% uptime
- 30GB of transfer
- 500MB of storage
- secure server
- control panels
- shopping carts, daily backups and a host of other features
- also 11 categories of daily news content you can add to your site that
will automatically update ... it includes financial, business and world
news, horoscopes, movies and weather
Click below for more info on PowerWeb and
to sign up
World's #1 WebSite Hosting
