By now, you’ve answered some questions about your site. You’ve thought about features, hosting, content management systems, and we’ve touched a little bit on design. Now we’re going to look at domain names:

Many internet marketing and web design books that I’ve read start out with domain names because they are so important– you have to have one first before even having a website.  I am mentioning it here because I think it’s very important to have an idea about your website before you start the process of choosing the best domain.  You can probably rattle off some awesome one word .com‘s that would be perfect for your business.  In 2010, almost all the short, quality domain names have already been purchased and are being held and offered for sale in a disorganized and overpriced marketplace, right?  Maybe not.  But picking a domain can be difficult; it involves bartering and/or being very creative.  Originally there were three what is called ” TLDs” (Top level domains):

.com stands for commercial

.org is usually refers to organization and was originally planned for non-profits but is open to everyone and always has been (we like these)

.net which stood for network which could be used for internal company services– but is again open to everyone and open to use for random websites of all types.

Since then, a lot more TLDs have become available, including: .info, .me, .name, .mobi, .us, .biz, .la…. and the list goes on. Despite the large variety of TLDs available, more .coms have been registered than any other domain name and virtually all of the largest sites on the internet are .com (and maybe even all of the top 1000– I haven’t checked.. e.g. Amazon, Google, Yahoo). There are also lots of prominent .orgs. If you have the choice, you should always try to get the .com or .org.  But with that said, I would much rather have a shorter, cooler TLD name than a crappier, longer .com.

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