What Is A Domain Name?

If you’re planning to build a website, you may hear or read “domain name” fairly often.

It’s basically is the address of a website. ie., www.yourname.com. The domain is technically the word(s) after “www.” and the “.com” part.

It’s the shortest unit of information you can type to get somewhere on the web.

Many websites can be on a single domain. If you build your website on a website building platform, your website address (also known as “URL”) might be http://www.FreeWebsitePlace.com/yourusername/yourwebsite/

In that case, the domain is FreeWebsitePlace.com.

You also might get YourName.FreeWebsitePlace.com. That configuration is called a sub-domain.

The “.com” is a domain extension to create what’s known as Top Level Domain (or TLD). Learn all about it, and the various extensions on Wikipedia’s TLD page.

Why Have A Domain?

Having one for yourself or a business is the most professional looking-way for you to present yourself online. It shows that you’ve made a small investment in having your own name. People are much more likely to trust a business that has it’s own domain rather than http://sites.freewebsite.com/username/freelowqualitywebsiteformybusiness.

It makes it easy for people to find you. It’s simple to type it in if it’s written somewhere, and people can usually remember it. And if you search for ‘your name here’ on Google, then your-name-here.com will most likely be among the first results.

And the great thing is, it’s really not a big investment. Registering a new domain will often be less than $15 per year.

You should at minimum invest in getting your name. If yourname.com is taken, try .net or another domain extension (there are many to choose from: .com, .net, .org, .co, .me, .io, and many others).

Or try different combinations. For a personal site, if firstname.com or firstnamelastname.com were taken, you can add various words before and after.

Shorter is better, you’ll want to be able to print it on resumes, business cards, and elsewhere. People should be able to remember it or type it into their browser easily. I don’t recommend putting a hyphen in the domain… It makes it harder to remember.

How To Register Yours

If you don’t have a web host or a domain name yet, my favorite host, BlueHost, includes free domain name registration for the first year with a new account.

Having a hosting account is necessary to create a quality website, but if you only need to register a domain for now, I suggest going with NameCheap.

What questions do you have about domain names? Leave a comment below and I’ll answer!