Lesson 3: Choosing a Domain Name (eg. www.litsl.com)

There are many places to search for available domain names. I favour 34sp.com, who have sorted out my domain names and web hosting for several years and have excellent technical support (seemingly at all hours of the day or night).

There are a few things to consider when choosing a domain name:

• often you will tell someone your domain name, so if you have hyphens in there or it's hard to spell you may lose business.


• a good portion of web users attempt to guess domain names rather than using search. Will yours be guessable?


• domain extensions have certain implied meanings:
  
  • .com - has an international flavour with an american bias and usually refers to a company
  
  
  • .co.uk - UK company but some charities like Friends of the Earth use it too
  
  
  • .net - a bit obscure and usually picked when someone cannot get their first choice of extension
  
  
  • .org - a good name for a not-for-profit organisation, and has an international flavour (Greenpeace International uses this)
  
  
  • .org.uk - a good name for a UK not-for-profit

If you are shopping for a domain name and the one you want doesn't seem to be available you can do what's called a 'whois' search, www.whois.net is one such company.