Finding the Right Domain Name for your New Website

Coming up with a short, catchy and relevant domain name can be a difficult task. Specially because most of the top domain names have already been registered by someone else. It's always good to know the setting and context of the website before you purchase a domain in order to make this process a lot easier.

The Newbie Toolkit: How To Register And Host Your First Domain 

The ideal domain name should be:

1. Short
2. Relevant
3. Memorable

It's best to avoid:

• Under scores and dashes
• Numbers (when not relevant to the subject)
• Alternate (but incorrect) spellings

Then we need to go to a domain look up service such as http://www.checkdomain.com/ to see whether the domain that we want is available. Be ready for disappointment because most of the time you will find that the particular domain is unavailable. Check to see whether pre or post fixing words like "hot", "best", "all", "the", "top" and "get" would work. If not, you will have to move on to the next phase.

This is when your domain knowledge comes in to play. Try to pair words which are relevant to the site's content to come up with a catch name. This might not directly reflect the subject matter but should be easy to relate to it.

eg.

• rottentomatoes.com
• stackoverflow.com
• gsmarena.com

Keep at it till you find something that you really like. Do not get discouraged and get yourself a domain like "the-best-music-online-10.com". It's a hard and time consuming process but it's better to be patient and register the right domain name than end up with something that you will realize to be unusable after a few hours.

I have purchased several domains in the past and some of them proved to be fruitless and a waste of time and money (such as amazon40.com). But the one's that I purchased after doing my research and trying patiently, have been very successful (e.g. steamsigs.com, theduffel.com). So be patient and keep trying. You will not regret the extra effort.

Case Study:

As a small exercise, I decided to try coming up with a good name for an arbitrary web site, just to see the effectiveness of the given guidelines. The subject I selected is (I'm thinking of one right now ;)) menswear. It could be a site which sells menswear or reviews them. Doesn't really matter.

The obvious key word would be menswear. Let's come up with some domain names to check (I'm only considering .com for now because its the one used the most):

menswear.com

topmenswear.com

hotmenswear.com

allmenswear.com

bestmenswear.com

totalmenswear.com

All are registered. Let's come up with a list of relevant terms:

man, clothes, garb,look,smart,free,handsome(too long), charmer,hunky, perfect, fit, apparel, attire

First find, hunkgarb.com. Short and catchy but let's keep on looking for something a bit more formal.

Second find, hunkattire.com.. hmm...

Third time's the charm!! manattire.com is still available. It's catchy with a bit of sophistication. Should be perfect.

I haven't given details of the last phase of the process but it's pretty straight forward. Come up with keywords and look for synonyms. This is very important. You'd most probably find a word that's more befitting to your purpose. This is how I ended up with the word "attire"... by looking for a synonym for "clothes".

So this concludes the case study. Most probably the domain "manattire.com" would not be available in a few months but I think it served to detail the process involved in coming up with the perfect domain name.

Good resources:

 

Increase the number of your Facebook fans within hours

I've recently created a page for my website on Facebook (this one) but hasn't had any luck increasing the number of followers apart from my friends. I signed up for Twiends and it instantly increased the number of my fans. It's only been about 5 minutes and I've already got 5 followers.
The system works pretty well. You "like" other people's pages to earn credits and redeem them by getting people to "like" your website. You could buy credits if you want to get more exposure. I'm optimistic about the results and think this would prove to be a great service.

Edit: One catch though.Someone could (possibly?) like your Facebook page, earn the credits and then Unlike it. Should rarely happen but there is a chance.

Starting and Running Your Own Website on the Cheap

One of the main obstacles to launching your own website is cost. The initial cost of starting a website could be given as the sum of:

• The domain name
• Hosting charges
• Charges for designing the website
• Advertising cost

For something that you launch out of your own interest, we could eliminate the advertising cost. Let's look at each of the other factors to find out the minimum required capital.

1. Purchasing a domain name

You could easily get your free .co.cc domain name from http://www.co.cc.

But for if you have long term plans for the site, and if the site is something you could profit from, it's always better to get a .com domain (or .net or .org according to your purpose). Your website would get better exposure and recognition this way. The cheapest registration service that I've found so far is http://www.domainsarefree.com, which offers .com,.net and .org registrations for $3.99. There are cheaper services which have a lower price point ($1.99) but it's always better to go with a reliable service which you trust since you would have to renew the registration annually.

2. Hosting charges

This is one of the most important steps in launching a website. Selecting a good host is critical to ensure the performance and up-time of the website. So it'll be bit of a juggle in the cost-benefit department. You need to get a cheap host, but also someone that offers a reliable service. I settled on HostGator since it had a good track record and was a recognized and trusted service. So far their service has been extremely good. My site's never gone down. There's extremely good support for PHP, and mysql via the control panel. They also provide a free site builder with pre-designed templates. They have three plans:

• Hatchling - $4.95, Single Domain, UNLIMITED Disk Space, UNLIMITED Bandwidth, Shared SSL Certificate
• Baby - $7.95,UNLIMITED Domains, UNLIMITED Disk Space, UNLIMITED Bandwidth. Shared SSL Certificate
• Business - $12.95, UNLIMITED Domains,UNLIMITED Disk Space,UNLIMITED Bandwidth, FREE Dedicated SSL & IP, FREE Toll-Free Number

*The above are new prices. Previously the hatching plan was $7.95. Price might change in future.

The hatching plan is a good starting point for a new website.

3. Designing the website

The cheapest way to design your website is to do it yourself. If you are tech savvy, you could write on from scratch. If not, you could use pre-built free website templates available online (or use website building tools provided by the host). But the easiest method by far, is to create Wordpress blog. Some think that Wordpress could only be used for blogging. This was my impression at first. But after using it for a while, I realized that you could customize a wordpress blog to suit almost any requirement. You could add content to the site as blog posts, post them as a stream or sticky on the home page, customize the theme to suit the context and install plugins to boost productivity. You have to learn a few tricks to make it behave the way you want but it'll come after you play around with the files for a while. This would be the best option for a website for which you will be adding content continuously and want to minimize the hazzle of maintenance.

4. Advertising your site

In order to get the full benefit from your site, you have to make people aware of it. Assuming you don't want to spend any money on it (as is the case with most personal websites) you could start link building and adding the site to social networks. Post on relevant forums and make sure you're not breaking the rules by providing a link to the site. Create tome directory listings. These and more steps are explained thoroughly on several blogs and sites so I'll skip this step.

Final total(first month): $3.99+4.95 = $8.94

Monthly cost:$4.95

It's always best to go with a better vendor if you could spare a bit more cash. I did my domain registration also with hostgator and the total cost for me was:

Final total(first month): $22.16 + $7.95 = $30.11

Monthly cost:$7.95

That's it. Now all it takes is a bit of your time, some link love and SEO and you'll be on your way!

Visit my site to see what I ended up with ;)