Slide 16 of 26

Your site can be hosted on someone else's domain or you can buy your own domain name. The advantage of owning your own domain is that the name can reflect the name of your site and can be easy to remember. A website with its own domain name is usually taken to be "more serious" than one that is part of a hosted community. In addition, search engines tend to rank pages from domains higher than those from personal web pages.

Many types of domains are now offered. ".com" are the most common, and are supposed to represent for-profit companies. ".org" domains are supposed to be for non-profit organizations, and ".net" domains are supposed to be for networks. However, ".com" names are the most popular, since browsers look for the ".com" domain first if only the first part is typed into the URL text box.

Domain names should be brief, but relevant. Names can be up to 62 characters long, but nobody wants to type that much. Virtually all single name English words are now taken for domain names. If you find a single name domain still available, check your dictionary - it is likely that you have misspelled it. In addition, most, if not all 3 letter domain names are now gone. It is best to choose a two or three word or abbreviation domain name. Check domain availability and register your domain at a discount domain registrar (such as GoDaddy.com), where you will pay less than 50% of what it costs at networksolutions.com.