You’ve decided on a niche for your new website.
You’ve made a shortlist of domain names you’d like to use.
What’s next?
Now, you need to find out whether or not your favourite name is already taken and if it is available, shell out some money to make it yours. Don’t panic this is easy enough and it won’t cost you the earth. Because I live in England I’ll mainly be referring to UK-based sites, but I’ll try to mention some sites for the US and other countries as well (and maybe some nice people will add comments to recommend sites in other countries that I don’t know about).
The first thing to do is find a site to register with. You can just go to Google and search for “register a domain name” and you’ll get plenty of sites to choose from. They all do basically the same thing; check that the name’s available, take your details for registration, take some money from you, then tell the relevant registrar (like Nominet for .co.uk addresses) that the domain name now belongs to you.
A couple of sites that I have had recommended to me are 1and1.co.uk and 123-Reg.co.uk but there are plenty of others out there if you shop around. As far as US-based sites go, I’ve heard a lot of good things about GoDaddy but again there are a lot of others to choose from. Most of these will offer a combined package to register your domain name and provide hosting for your new site and will often list a whole load of whizz-bang features like site-builders and easy-blogs to boot. Don’t worry too much about these things. If you’re serious about setting up your own site and intend to practice the SEO techniques that we’ll be learning in upcoming posts, you’ll be better off taking the DIY approach so that you have greater control over what happens with your site than these kind of quick creation tools will offer.
Whichever registration site you go for, your first port of call on their site will be the domain checker. This tool will allow you to type in the domain name you’d like to register and will check to find out if it’s already been taken. They’ll usually report back with a list of all the various possible TLDs (.com, .co.uk, .net etc) as well as some simple variations of the name you typed, as suggestions in case the particular one you wanted is already taken. If your preferred domain is taken, you’ll probably want to ignore the suggested alternatives and just move on to check the next one on your shortlist (you did make a shortlist didn’t you?) and try to keep in mind that you ideally want to get a .com or .net version of the address, or at the very least the .co.uk (if you’re in the UK - if you’re in Australia then you’ll want .com.au instead). If the only ones that are still available are .name or .me.uk or any of the other less well known extensions, you’ll be better off trying a different name altogether.
Once you’ve run a few of your preferred domain names through the checker and found out which are available, it’s time to part with some cash. Whichever site you chose to register with you’ll usually find that a .co.uk domain will cost you a little under £3 per year (most of the time you’ll be expected to pay for a minimum of two years up front) while .com and .net addresses are generally about £9 per year.
The sites will lead you through the process of registering your new domain, providing the neccesary information for you to claim ownership and taking payment from your credit card and you’re done.
Once you’ve registered you’ll be able to login in to your account’s control panel with the registering site and set yourself up with an email address on your shiny new domain (isn’t that much nicer than just having a boring old hotmail or gmail address?) and control the technical stuff like pointing your domain name at the appropriate DNS servers for your web hosting provider (that’s if you’ve decided to use a different host rather than taking out one of the combined packages).
We’ll go into more detail next time about choosing a hosting provider and setting up your webspace and then we can start actually building a website and creating content (and that’s where the real fun begins).
