All About Domain Names

It's the bit that comes after www : www.whatever.com, www.anything.co.uk, and so on

You can, but:

• You are restricted to using the webspace your Internet Service Provider gives you
• It doesn't look very professional: www.verybigcompany.freeserve.co.uk. Would you use this name to represent your business?

Yes.

The most compelling reason at the moment is that of availability. Thousands of names are being registered each day - if you don't get the name you want today it may be gone forever by tomorrow.

As the internet becomes more and more an integral part of our lives, your domain name will become as important as your business name. Register that name before someone else does!

Firstly, there are some rules:

• The name can be up to 47 characters in length
• It can be made up of letters, numbers and '-' signs
• It must be unique (i.e. nobody has registered it already)
• If you want to register a .ltd.uk name, it must reflect exactly the name of your limited company

We believe that 'concept' names are often more effective than company names. For instance, if you sell hand-crafted furniture, we would suggest

www.furniture.co.uk

rather than

www.joe-smith.co.uk

Why? You'll probably get a lot of your site traffic via Search Engines - your visitors may just be looking for furniture, and probably won't know the name of your business at that point. Thus, 'furniture' will score higher in the Search Engine rankings.

No.

Even if you haven't yet got a website we recommend you register your domain name to prevent someone else from registering it.

• You can point the name at a website straight away, or at a later date. You don't have to buy your web hosting package from us.
• You can receive emails via that domain name straight away (e.g. if you registered www.mycompany.com, any emails sent to, say, office@mycompany.com could be redirected to your existing email account).
• You can point more than one domain name at the same website
• You can point your domain name at the free webspace which your Internet Service Provider gives you.

You can register as many domain names as you wish. If you are registering names for your website we recommend 'cornering the market' in your name - try to register the .com, .co.uk and .net etc. versions of the name, plus any variants which are close to your name. This should minimise the amount of traffic which accidentally goes to a similarly-named site and prevents competitors setting up similarly-named sites. For example:

You set up a website on

• www.very-cheap-tickets.co.uk

Your competitor sets up

• www.very-cheap-tickets.com
• www.very-cheap-tickets.net
• www.very-cheap-tickets.ltd.uk
• www.very-cheap-ticket.com
• www.very-cheap-ticket.net
• www.very-cheap-ticket.ltd.uk

Where do you think most of your traffic will go?

You can 'park' more than one domain name on a website. For instance www.very-big-company.com and www.very-big-company.co.uk could point to the same site. However, some search engines will penalise your listing if too many names are parked on one site, so don't overdo it!

Some people (us included) believe that domain names just may be a good investment. Names cost relatively little to register, but some may be worth a great deal of money in the future. Unfortunately, most of the obvious names have been snapped up, but you may find some still available (we did - see our list of Domain Names for Sale). If you find one that has slipped through the net, you may feel the urge to invest!