Domain registration: Choosing your domain
When you set up your web site through a web hosting provider instead of simply creating an account on one of the blog sites on the world wide web you have the advantage of being able to register a domain name and determine what the name of your site will be. However, how do you choose the right domain registration for your site? You want to choose a name which will make it easy for people to visit your site, and there are a number of things that you should consider as you work on your choice. Put together a list of choices and pare them down by considering whether or not they work with the following tests to come up with a name for your site which will work for the majority of visitors on the world wide web.
First of all, is the domain which you are considering easy to type and easy to remember? This is one of the primary things that you need to consider when you are naming your site – if you put a lot of unusual letters or a strange spelling (i.e. a non-standard spelling) into the title of your site it is likely that a large percentage of the users who want to view your site will put in a different site’s spelling and be directed to that site by mistake. When you have the option, choose the spelling of a word which is the most common, and choose words which are easy for someone to keep in mind after hearing only once – sometimes one impression is all the chance that you have to make someone remember your web site and what it is about!
That leads us to our next test for your domain – does it communicate what the site is about effectively? There are two basic ways that you can go with this consideration – you can choose a name which is very straightforward and descriptive, or you can choose one which is not descriptive of the content of the site at all, but which people who visit your site will be able to remember easily (names such as Google and Yahoo certainly didn’t inspire images of search engines when they were first adopted, but the names were easy to remember and became part of the worldwide lexicon of the internet).
Finally, make sure that the site name that you are thinking of works as an internet name – it should not contain any kinds of punctuation, and if there are multiple words in the title of your web site then you may want to think about the way that the title will look when it is all run together, or you may want to shorten the name or simplify it so that it can be expressed in a single word.
Thinking about these things before you go live with your web site is important from a practical standpoint as well as being an aesthetic issue, and it will determine how many visitors you are able to get for your site and decide, in part, how popular it will become!