Domain Name.
In order to have a legitimate web site you need to create and purchase your domain. Many of the cheap or free web site hosts that you may see will allow you to create your domain and host your site, however the actual URL (address) of your site will not be truly a domain. It will be a sub-domain with a long name that may have your chosen word or phrase at the beginning, but the service you are using at the end. Here is an example http://your_chosen_name.the_host_provider_name.com instead of http://www,your_chosen_name.com. Which one looks more professional? I can guarantee you, just as you went through an effort to carefully create the name of your business, all the same effort resides in creating your domain. It is getting more and more difficult to get a good domain name these days as the web has exploded. Some domain names that you may want to use might be for sale. If your business is positioned well enough, it makes sense to try and buy something that would be automatically associated to your business or name if it is not available. There are many extension choices as well; the extension is the .com, or .net, and so on. As the Web gets more and more crowded there will be newer and many more extensions to consider. For now the object would be to attempt a .com extension as it is the most commonly known, used and expected. After that I would suggest .net but only if your specific name is available. This attempt at creating the right name, and it should be chosen very carefully, can be time consuming. Chances are, if you thought of it, someone else has too and they may have already registered it.
Some things to consider when choosing your name; make it unique, but memorable. Getting too cute or fancy can create a long hard to remember or difficult to type URL. This can be difficult to avoid, as mentioned earlier there are millions of domain names already registered. Try to include one major keyword in your name if you can, this will help you later on when we talk about the science and art of being found among the masses. An example of a good name would be http://www.repairman.com where the name says exactly what you do, and has a keyword that would likely be used to search out repair men in your area. A not so good name would be http://frankssuperdupercheapfastandprofessionalrepair.com. This name is much too long and difficult to type and does not really tell anyone what you do other than repair. What type of repair we are not sure, it does at least contain a keyword “repair†and that is good. However, the rest of it will be tough to remember and very difficult to type in. With a max length of 2048 bytes (characters) in a URL, you can get a little crazy if you wanted, but it would not be wise. You want to keep your name fairly short, easy to type, easy to remember, and tells people what you do if possible. We could examine the name of this site for instance. There is a lot of competition in my field and finding a good name is very difficult so I approached it over several days and with several phrases before finally settling on this one. It is not terrible to type, does say what I do – provide technical solutions (tech short for technical) and if someone uses the word net instead of web, provides a keyword in the name.