If you were to believe all the ads from GoDaddy, you’d think that owning your own website is pretty darn easy. Well, guess what? It is! For the remainder of this week, we’re going to show you just how easy it is. Stick around and follow along with us as we show you how to take your idea from a .com dream to reality.

The Basics: 

A website is made up of two main parts. The first is the domain name, which we’ll deal with today. The second part is called the host or hosting. A domain name is simple, brianmahoney.ca is ours, while hosting can be a bit more complicated. Don’t worry, the whole thing is easy enough and very cheap. We’ll take things step by step, just to show you how easy and cheap it is. So, domain name and hosting. Off we go!

Dot Com, dot Org, what’s best?

A domain name is made up of two things, too. The first is the actual name of the site, facebook, for example. The second part is everything after the ‘.’ , .com for example. You can choose .com, .net, .org, .info,  but you have to make a name that pops to mind when someone is looking for your site. (Yes, we know that brianmahoney.ca isn’t easy to remember at all but you can learn from our mistake, right? )

A commercial site would use a .com name, while a charity site might use .org. Work on the first part of the name first, suzysellsflowers for example, then decide on what type of domain you want. Suzysellsflowers.com makes sense, since selling things makes it a commercial site. Suzylovesdogs could be a .org or .info site.

Lastly, if you’re going to use a string of words, think of how the words run together. Will people know that the s at the end of the first word isn’t attached to the second word? Here are some examples of domain naming gone horribly wrong:

Funny Domain Names: The Most Inappropriate URLs On The Web

Once you get a feeling for the kind of name you want, you need to find out if that name is available. We would suggest doing that when you’re actually ready to buy the domain. What is ‘buy the domain’? That’s when you cough up the money to take possession of the name of your future site. Once you actually get it, you have to renew the name every year in order to keep it. Let’s say that Facebook.com forgets to renew its name. Theoretically, anyone could snap the name up and claim it as their own. Watch out for that, OK?

Let’s use GoDaddy as an example. We are not recommending GoDaddy but we use it to be our domain name service. We’ll get into that later but let’s see if our domain name is available. Head over to godaddy.com:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you get there, type in the name that you’ve come up with. We’re using ‘suzylovesflowers’ . Click on Go and see what comes up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were lucky this time, weren’t we? Our domain name is available. Better yet, it’s cheap, only $9.99 a year. Below the main section, you’ll see that other variations of that name are also available. If you’re going to buy a domain with the hopes of making it into a popular site, you might want to think about buying up all the other variations of it at the same time. Why? Well, if suzylovesflowers.com becomes famous, anyone could start a site named suzylovesflowers.org or .net and siphon away some of your hits. If you think facebook.com is the only domain name that facebook owns, type facebook.org into your search bar and see where it leads. Try any other variation and you’ll see that Facebook has covered their bases quite well.

If your name is available, snap it up. Create an account on a site such as GoDaddy and pay for one or two years (or more since it’s cheaper at the start to buy a number of years than it is to renew it after one or two). GoDaddy will offer you all kinds of extras as you go, things that will add privacy and security but, you know what? We only take the name, nothing else. The price of the additional ‘stuff’ really adds up so we don’t bother with it. All of our domains are with GoDaddy, mainly because it’s a big company and probably won’t go out of business any time soon.

At this point, you’ve spent ten bucks on your domain name. Didn’t we tell you it would be cheap? You can’t get much for ten bucks these days but you can get a domain name and armed with that, you can head out and make a website. Well, almost. You’ve got half of what you need. Next time we’ll talk about hosting the site, the second part of creating something on the web. Yes, GoDaddy hosts sites but we found them to be quite expensive for this so we headed off and got a much cheaper setup with someone else.

TIP: Just as there are two parts of a web site, there can be two different companies involved with holding it. GoDaddy is our domain name server, nothing else. They keep our domains safe and renew them periodically but they do not host our sites. We strongly suggest that you keep your domains with one company and your sites with someone else. A domain name server simply routes Internet traffic that is looking for a domain it holds to the computer that hosts that site. When you come to our site, you go through the GoDaddy computers first. They point your browser to the hosting company’s computers which then bring up the content that you see here. That part is complicated but you don’t have to worry about it. Let one company hold your domain name and let another company host your content.

What’s in a name? 

Hindsight is 20/20 they say and, if we could do this site over again, we’d use a name that is better suited to its content. Keep that in mind. When we first started out, we used a real name, not a generic product or service name. While brianmahoney.ca has worked quite well for us, we suggest that you choose a name that matches what your site’s main thrust is going to be. Anyone can own a domain name, that’s the easy and cheap part. It’s what comes later that makes the difference overall but the name is where you start. Make it good the first time

Thanks for reading!