Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction (OReilly Digital Studio)

2.3. What's in a Name?

You've found a plot of online real estate. You're ready to build your castle. Now: what to call the place? You need a catchy domain name, or web address, for your site.

As you begin thinking about your domain name, here are a few ground rules:

• A domain name can include alphanumeric characters and hyphens. Special characters like spaces, underscores, ampersands, money signs, punctuation marks, and asterisks are not permitted, and you shouldn't begin or end your domain name with a hyphen.

• Domain names aren't case-sensitive. MYsITe.com, MYSITE.COM, and mysite.com are all the same thing.

• For best results, a domain name should be no longer than 59 characters, not including the suffix, like .com, .org, or .net (which pushes the total length to 63 characters). Technically, your domain name can be longer, but some browsers have trouble resolving long names, so keep within the 59-character limit.

Aside from those points, anything goes. If you're building a personal home page or hobby site, let your imagination run wild. Feel free to trend to the goofy or bizarre. A fun domain name entertains you and your visitors. Nothing is worse than a serious home page.

If you're building a site for your business or organization, you should take a more methodical approach. You don't choose the name of your business haphazardly, and your domain name is just as important. It goes on all your business cards. It goes in your letterhead. It appears in advertisements. Sales reps and consultants spout it out to potential clients.

With that in mind, here are some of the qualities of a smart domain name:

Brevity

Smart domains are short and sweet. This way, they're easier to remember, and they're easier to type into the address field of a web browser. Never underestimate the laziness potential of postindustrial Western society. We are the people of microwave dinners and remote controls. Also, most people are very poor typists. A short domain name equals less chance for a typo.

Ease of pronunciation

Smart domains roll off the tongue. Your sales reps can say them. Your clients can repeat them. This doesn't mean that your domain name has to be a word. It can be an abbreviation, like VHS or DVD, both of which have a nice rhythm and ring (and, yes, both are taken).

Ease of spelling

Your domain name has to be easy to pronounce. But when your sales rep says "beeconsultants.com," does she mean be as in "to be or not to be," or bee as in "bee in my bonnet," or the letter B, or B-hyphen? By the time she gets done explaining which it is, the client has moved on to the next booth at the trade show. For this reason, try to avoid homophones, or words that sound like other words, and stay away from cute phonetic spellings of common words, like majyck instead of magic, unless of course you want to direct traffic to someone else's site.

Consistent tone

Your domain name is like the title of a book or movie or the trade name of a store. It helps to set the stage for the contents of your site. You wouldn't walk into a place called Jari's Fresh Fish and expect to find a wide selection of aromatherapy candles. The same logic applies to your domain name. Try to choose a name that fits.

Whether you're building your site for personal pleasure or serious business, the challenge is coming up with a suitable domain name that hasn't already been registered by somebody else. Fortunately, you're the creative type. There are plenty of good names still available. You just have to be very clever about finding yours.

When you're busy at brainstorming, come up with a healthy list of possibilities, and include as many as you can. Fifteen or twenty is not too many. Depending upon your site, fifty might not be too many. A good place to start is the name of your business or organization. If this name is too long, of if it's already taken, think along the lines of an abbreviation or nickname. Chances are, if your business has existed in brick and mortar form for a while, you and your clients and partners have devised quick nicknames or shortened forms of your official trade name for ease of reference. These are ideal for the Web, not just because they're shorter, but also because they're more individualistic, and they convey more of your corporate culture or personality. You can't get enough of this kind of differentiation when you're in the marketplace with thousands of competitors worldwide.

Another strategy is to brand yourself to the type of business that you do. If you sell books, you might be extremely interested in acquiring a domain like books.com (which Barnes and Noble has already done). The only drawback here is that competition is even fiercer for these types of names. Who wouldn't want to be the spokesperson for books on the entire Web? Still, if you're in a fairly specialized business, you might have some luck securing this type of domain, or maybe you can diversify a bit. Pick two products that you sell, connect them with the word and, and try the combinations.

2.3.1. Reserving Your Domain

To check the availability of your domain name and then reserve it for your personal use, hop onto the Web and visit a registrar, of which there are many. Your web host might even be one of them. When you sign up for hosting service, see if you can reserve your domain name in the process. It's a convenience for you, and it might even save you the standard annual $35 registration fee. In addition, you won't have to point your domain name from your registrar's servers to your web host's servers when you publish your site. (See "What Happens Next?" later in this chapter for more information.)

If you'd prefer to shop around for the best deal, or if you'd like to get a specialty top-level domain (see "Comparing Top-Level Domains" later in this chapter), you're free to register with a service other than your web host. Some registrars charge substantially less than the typical $35 per year, but they may expect you to sign up with their preferred web-hosting partner or agree to a longer term than you might want, so be sure to read the fine print. On the other hand, don't pay more than $35 per year for registration, unless you have special requirements for your top-level domain.

Domain ownership is something of a misnomer, in that you actually lease the use of a particular domain over a given period. The permanent transfer of a domain to your private ownership forever doesn't yet exist, much to the consternation of capitalists everywhere. Typically, your registration lasts for one year, after which you have the option of renewing. Also, you pay for the lease up front, not in weekly or monthly installments. If you choose not to renew the domain after your term expires, your name becomes available to anyone, so it's a good idea to stay on top of your registration. Most registrars send you an email reminder a couple months in advance of expiration, and some even automatically renew it for you unless you tell them otherwise. Still, if your term is a couple months from expiring and you haven't heard anything from your registrar, you might want to contact them and ask about their renewal options.

Different registrars offer different terms for their leases, up to ten years in some cases, and they usually give you a break in price for the longer terms, because, once again, you're paying up front. For most first-time web builders, a yearlong term is long enough to decide if you like being a webmaster. You can always get a longer lease when your renewal period comes around.

2.3.2. Comparing Top-Level Domains

The top-level domain or TLD comes at the end of a domain name. It's the suffix of the name, such as .com, .org, and .net. Depending upon your registrar, you will likely have several choices for your top-level domain. Which should you choose?

One consideration is applicability. Top-level domains were originally intended for web sites of a certain kind. For example, the famous and ubiquitous .com TLD was set aside for commercial purposes, but remember the old saying about how good intentions tend to pave a certain highway. When the Web exploded into popular consciousness in the late 1990s, competition for the best names became merciless, and the distinctions among the top-level domains began to blur. Anyone could (and can) register a .com domain, and nobody was checking to see that all .com owners were actually running commercial businesses.

Another consideration is availability. The same second-level domain, or the "name" part of the name as in amazon or ebay, when paired with a different TLD, gives you an entirely different domain. Therefore, ebay.com is not the same domain name as ebay.net or ebay.org. If your second-level domain name of choice is already taken under your preferred TLD, you might think about registering under a different TLD, with one small proviso. While the distinctions among TLDs are blurry at best, you should at least try to keep their original intentions in mind, and be careful not to stray too far afield. For instance, if you're building a commercial web site, you should probably shy away from the .org TLD, which still has strong associations with the nonprofit sector.

On the other hand, if you're a nonprofit and you can get your hands on the .com version of the name, do it! The .com TLD is the one that everyone knows. It's synonymous with the Internet in Western culture. While .org is beginning to build up steam in this age of political blogs and grassroots activism, the .com TLD is still the most desirable from a marketing standpoint, which is the third consideration as to which TLD you should choose.

The most common TLDs are unrestricted in the sense that anyone can register them for any purpose at a cost of no more than $35 per year. Table 2-2 lists them. Remember, not every registrar offers all TLDs, so if your TLD of choice isn't available at your registrar of choice, find a different registrar. A good place to start is the web site of the operator of your desired TLD.

While general-purpose TLDs like .com and .org are open to anyone, you have to qualify for certain TLDs such as .museum, .edu, and .pro by providing credentials to the registrar and paying a premium above the standard $35 yearly fee. Table 2-3 lists some of these TLDs in case you're interested.