Over on our sister design weblog, we’ve started a series Building a Better Website. The second article, 7 Stages of Setting up a Business Weblog should, in hindsite, maybe have been over here. Nevertheless, this third article deals with the first stage: finding and registering a domain name for your business website and weblog. Since this is not really a design-related topic, it’s here on the small business tips weblog but is still part of the Building a Better Website series.

To help you in the process of finding a suitable domain here is a quick checklist, followed by a screencast video showing you part of the process.

1. Make a short list of domain names, preferably based on your business name.

2. Try to avoid hyphens and numbers, unless they are part of your business name.
3. If you ever plan to sell your business, try to avoid using personal domain names, unless your business is based on your name.
4. Use AjaxWhois to quickly test your shortlist for various TLDs. TLD = Top Level Domain, aka extension. That is, .com, .biz, .net, .etc, are all TLDs.
5. When possible, try to choose the .com version of your preferred domain name. The video below uses .net and .info, but only because they domains in question were not for a formal business.
6. If you cannot find a domain name directly based on your business name, you might consider putting your city or state in front of your desired domain name. For example, if you want breadbakers.com, which is taken, you could try floridabreadbakers.com. The draw back is that if you want to sell your business to someone in another state, they may not want it if they don’t like the domain name.
7. If you register a new name, you have many registrars to choose from. Try to pick a well-known registrar with multiple payment options and auto-renewal. If you plan to build a site that is crucial to your business, then you do not want to let the domain accidentally expire. GoDaddy is one of the largest registrars in the world who match all these criteria. Namecheap is another good choice, though they may not have as many payment options, and renewal is currently manual.
8. Sometimes, you simply have to break out the wallet and buy an existing domain instead of being able to register a new one. This is a decision that’s up to you and based on how you plan to use your domain name.

Click on the start button below to watch the screencast video.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under branding, marketing, tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.