Domain Names

A domain name and "URL" refer to the same thing, conceptually. Both terms refer to a selectable name. Domain names work similar to the license plat on your car. Let's say your car is a website. Then your license plate is what gives you "authorization" to run on the road. Technically, you could run your website without one, but it would be a drab world of cryptic numbers, dots, and weird names that mean very little. So, OK, it's not a perfect analogy. Let's say it is more like the Vanity Plate world. So now, if your want to call your car "Rubber Duck" ... oops, too many letters ... how about RUBRDUK ... you can do it. The main difference here is that there is one secretary of state office for the entire planet. So if your name is taken ... too bad. Except for one caveat.

That is something called Top Level Domain, or TLD. A TLD refers to the last letters that follow the period (dot, in the lingo of the net). For example .com (dot-com) is a TLD. So it dot-net, and dot-org, and dot-edu. Some TLD's are reserved. For example, you cannot just buy a dot-edu. You must be a certified college or university. Same with dot-gov. You must be a governmental body. But most TLD's are freely available for you to buy. So if your name in dot-com form is taken, you can try a different TLD.

Here are some common TLD's

• .GOV - government (restricted)
• .EDU - Educational institution (restricted)
• .COM - company
• .ORG - organization
• .NET - Network - once reserved for network service providers
• .INFO - Take a guess
• .NAME
• .ME (Montenegro)
• .US - entities within the United States
• ... most 2 letter designations refer to the country indicated by the two letters, for example, .CA would be a Canadian site. Some pretty interesting names have been created using sub-domains and TLD's. Take the popular social book marking site, del.icio.us, the sociakl bookmark site, or join.me a very cool and free webinar hosting tool.
  
  If you were disappointed you could not get your desired domain as a dot-com, consider a dot-co. CO is the country code for Columbia. Like many countries, there are not enough people in their country needing a domain name, so the country has made selling domains an additional income stream.

When you choose a domain name for your site there are some generally accepted best practices that will help you a great deal.

• Make it as close to your business name as possible
• Multiple key words are good from a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perspective
• Spaces are not allowed, but dashes make a good substitute. Better yet, just cram the words together. Domain names are not case sensitive so when you display the name it is perfectly fine to simply capitalize to distinguish the words like this - http://www.MountaintopChristian.com
• Shorter is better
• Memorable is better yet
• Unless your acronym or abbreviation is short, memorable, or both, keep brainstorming
• Naturally, the number one criteria is that your desired domain name be available. If you find your name is taken, you may be able to still obtain it. You can in some cases buy it. Often a name will be owned by someone who has no intention of using it. Backorder is another way to get a desired name.

Once you have a domain, you can use something called a sub-domain to continue the branding. For example, if you own the domain ABC.com (don't you wish?) you might point www.abc.com at your general information site, and blog.abc.com at your blog, and service.abc.com at your customer service site. The first part, "www", "blog", or "service" would be considered a "sub-domain". Some domain name provides and hosting companies allow you to have sub-domains at a small extra charge, or even for free.