Creating or registering a domain name is the one of the initial steps to establish your presence on the World Wide Web. For anybody who must capitalize on the vastness of the internet, having a domain or a website is a precursor for individuals, businesses or organizations for furthering theirends or even purely to outreach the international community. They can be framed to be popular and catchy, and over a longer time turn out to be a viable identification for a particular establishment.
Setting up a domain is relatively simple if you as much as know your way about a computer. For starters, a domain essentially requires to be registered with ICANN or “The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” through a domain name registrar. Renowned registrars include www.godaddy.com, www.1and1.com and www.register.com among others which cofunction with ICANN in the management and maintenance of the online space we call the internet. These “hosting services” charge a small fee ranging anywhere from $10 to $35 for a time (monthly/annually), depending upon the services you wish to choose in addition to ownership of that domain like data transfer limits, traffic restrictions and usable data space.
You can choose to either use a hosting service like the websites mentioned above or without one by using your own server as a host (may be an old repurposed computer). The latter being more complicated and demanding extensive monitoring; is suitable for large-scale organizations which prefer to really fine-tune their online activities. However, using a hosting service is far simpler and more than acceptable for normal functioning of a website.
The first step is to decide a domain name for your organization or establishment. Make sure that it has not already been taken which is very likely that it will be, considering the broad expansion of the internet over time. Registrars automatically check the availability of your desired domain name to avoid duplicity as all of them are linked to the ICANN database. You can do this by accessing the website of a reputable domain registrar which alsoprovides a straightforward method to creating your own website. Use the domain name availability checker to get a positive on the exclusivity of the name of your website, which ideally should be easy to remember, professional, clear and identifies your purpose to attract more visitors to your page. Avoid trivial and confusing names which could possibly mislead or frustrate a visitor.
Ordinarily, the final part of domain names end with “.com” or “.net”, which most internet users assume is true with all websites, but in fact these two TLDs (Top-Level Domains) cost the highest for the same reason as stated. Cheaper suffixes such as “.info” or “.biz” would be convenient on the wallet but it finally comes down to whether it suits the purpose of the website and does not seem conspicuously out of place.
The hosting services finally require a payment after the steps involving providing basic information and filling necessary forms have been completed. Paypal and Credit card are widelyaccepted with the more popular registrars who also cater for value added services like additional data space and lenient traffic restrictions to fit your requirement. After this, you can use many of their tools to administer the website and upload stuff to it as you please. Software such as Dreamweaver and Web Studio are also supported to fine-tune the framework of your page to make it more attractive and useful for the visitors and easy to maintain for the administrator.
