Getting started: Register a Domain name

What will I need to get started?

First choose a name for your website.

 

choosing a domain name

When choosing a name for your website, you want to take a number of factors in to consideration, is your company or business already known by a specific name? Imaging that your existing customers are going to search for you, what will they search for in Google? If for example you are already known as “Tony’s Curtains”, now is not the best time to decide to call yourself “Regal Window Dressings” or something else equally unrelated to what you are known as.

So next you want to see if TonysCurtains.com is available to register, you can search the internet for domain checkers, or if you like, you can just call us and we will check if for you free of charge. If it is available, great, you should register it. But what if like so many domains these days, the one you want is already registered? Well now you need to go back to your original line of thought about what your customers are likely to be searching for, in reality, there are probably a good number of businesses in the UK called “Tony’s Curtains”, if you are based in London, and your customers are also based in London, then they will probably be likely to search for you using “Tony’s Curtains London” or something similar. So now you should check to see if the domain: tonyscurtainslondon.com is available. You can play around with the wording to some degree to find a version you prefer, for example you may prefer TonysCurtainsinLondon.com or even LondonTonysCurtains.com but you get the idea.

  • Choose a good name for your website
  • Register the name as a domain name
  • Always register the domain name in your own name
  • Open a hosting account to hold your website
  • Now you are ready to start on the website itself

If you need help registering or selecting a new for your website feel free to call us

Why you should never let your designer register the domain for you

A practice that is sadly still common among less than honest web design companies and some freelance designers, is to register your domain name for you in their own name and then to charge you each year for the renewal. That doesn’t sound too bad you might think, but the problem comes if you ever want to move your website, or you no longer want to use them for your maintenance or updates. Because they registered your domain name in their own name, they will own it. They can control your website and even delete it and there will be nothing (or very little) that you can do about it. If you have a specific receipt from them for the domain you can take them to court, or apply to have the domain legally transferred to your own name and under your own control, but it is a lengthy, and often expensive process. And very often you will lose the actual website in the process. Something that could all have been avoided, had you registered the domain in your own name yourself in the first place. The same logic applies to your hosting account…