Acquiring a Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is a lot of fun, and also a great learning experience. Because your domain name defines you in a lot of ways, it's definitely worth taking some time and consideration. We actually ended up putting a lot of thought into the choice of a domain name for our website: webmarketjournal.com.

Here are some of the things we wanted our domain name to do:

• Generally describe what we do.
  
  
• Be easy to remember and easy to spell (so if someone only hears it once, they can type it as a url).
  
  
• Be a name we can use not only as a website url (webmarketjournal.com), but also as a company name (Web Market Journal), and possibly in an 800 telephone number (1-800-webmarket, for example).
  

Once we decided what we wanted for our domain name, we needed to find out if it was available. There are lots of places on the web where you can check to see if a domain name is taken. We started with WhoIs.com . They have a LOOKUP button where you type in a domain name and it tells you if it's available. If the name you're looking for is taken, you can see who owns it, and a lot of times the contact information is there so you can contact the owner and see if the domain name is for sale.

Some other good domain name search sites we found are:

• Instant Domain Search
  
  
• Domize
  
  
• NameBoy
  
  
• Domainsbot
  

We were actually pretty surprised when we found out that webmarketjournal.com wasn't taken!

We definitely wanted the .com extension, rather than .net, .org, or any one of the other extensions. Frankly, it's much more common, and people tend to type it automatically. If you have to settle for another extension, you run the risk that people will still type .com and be directed to someone else's website.

It's hard to describe the thrill we felt when we officially owned our very own domain name!

Coming up next... choosing a web hosting service.