What is a domain name?

by Joshua Adams on April 1st, 2010

A domain name is your website’s address on the internet. Every website needs one.

example: www.creativeimpactwebdesign.com

You will note that the above example domain is the domain name for the Creative Impact Web Design website. When this domain name is typed in your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc), your browser sends a request out to find where the website (and all of its files) are being hosted. It is essentially pointing visitors to the website itself.

Every website needs to have a domain name before it can go live online.

When choosing a domain name for your website, keep in mind several things:

What domain should you choose?
It should suggest the nature of your business or organization.
It should serve as a strong trademark and be catchy if possible as it will become a large part of your branding.
It should be easily remembered. Be careful of long domain names or hard to remember acronyms.
Remember that a long domain name means a long email address too.
It should be easy to spell and you should avoid double letters such as “creativeexam.com”. Notice how the double “e” can be hard to read?
It should pass the phone test. This being, can you easily and successfully convey to someone, via the phone, the address?
It may not contain special characters save for the hyphen (-)
I recommend avoiding hyphens as it is hard for a potential visitor to remember them.

What about “.com”, “.net”, or “.org”?
I recommend obtaining the “.com” for your domain name as it is generally more easily remembered and is generally the first one users will try.
If your website is a non-profit organization a “.org” name is acceptable and in many cases expected.
“.net” is acceptable, however not as desired as the “.com”. It is usually a good compromise if you can not get the “.com”.
The risk of using other TLD’s (Top Level Domains) besides “.com” is always that the user may actually try to type “.com” and get a competitor.

All of this being said, you will also need to choose a company to purchase your domain name with. There are plenty of companies out there such as Network Solutions, however we also provide domain name registration services and will take care of all of the behind-the-scenes work and issues as well as ensuring the name is renewed so it never expires unexpectedly on you.

Domain names are typically priced per year and the pricing is always better if you purchase more years in advance.

Contact Creative Impact Web Design for more details on our domain name services!

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