Build a High Quality Website on a Budget – Part One – Domains
As the entry point of this series of posts we would like to discuss the beginning! I am not talking big bang, green slime sort of days, but more about the moment in time in which you have had a great idea and you are thinking that you’d like a website to promote that idea. You are ready to start letting the world know that your idea is worthy of promotion.
So you have a little time and/or a very limited budget and think to yourself that you will embark on the journey of setting up your own website! The first place to start is often establishing a name for your business/idea and this will define the name of the website that you select. Although it may work as a slightly iterative process of a name that you like and seeing if a similar domain name is present.
Let’s run through an example….
Journal entry – Today:
Had a phenomenal idea if I say so myself…. what is the world short of? Love!! How is love conveyed? One way is through the magnaminity of hugs!! So I will create a business in which people can request hugs and someone geographically close, and who is a subscriber to the site will be emailed requesting that they deliver said hug. Money will be made through a standard advertising model. So you may think to yourself what name can I give to this outstanding idea? I want to go with something that details what this idea is about… hmm… hugs.com. This seems to convey the concept that the site is defining.
As a starting point, you go to your preferred domain registrar (simply type ‘domain registrar’ into your favourite search engine, if you’re currently favouriteless) to have a look for the availability of the domain that you have decided on. For this example we will select godaddy.com as our domain registrar. We visit their site and we enter the domain URL for which we are searching in the textfield – ‘hugs’, and from the dropdown we select the extension, in this case we are going for a .com domain (for a description of domain extensions, look at this wiki article). Then click on Search. In this example, this search returns the fact that the domain has already been selected and if you select the Get Info link, you will be able to get more information about when the domain was renewed and when it expires, and more besides, depending on the privacy levels set by the owner.
As hugs.com is not available and once the tears have dried it is possible to consider other options, how about hug-a-stranger.com? Still keeping the hug theme going, and the ‘-‘ symbols break up the name into a readable format, which will help people understand what it is all about! An experience which may be their first and last such journey of lucid clarity! As we check this, we see that it is available, but if you are now checking and it has gone, alas, so often is this the way in the Internet world! Act fast, pay now, consider what you have done when the bailiffs take your television away! Ho hum! So now it is possible to buy the domain using standard shopping cart functionality offered by most websites these days! Then you’re the happy owner of a web domain! Yippee! How easy was that! We know, awesome huh! 🙂
Obviously, with any purchase online you want to observe standard caution! Ensure that the page that is taking payment is using HTTPS protocols! You should see a little padlock on the browser that you’re using to show that the page is using encryption! We’d always recommend using sites that you trust, as while the chances of being a victim of Internet fraud is quite small, it is best to not assume that deceit does not occur!
The domain purchased, it then remains to get hosting.
