Domain Names to get a better URL

Homepage
My Experience
Client List
Website Creation Service

An Appropriate Image
Permission Marketing
Objectives of a website
Promote Your Website
Domain Names to get a better URL
UK Access Providers - How to Choose

Domain names say that you are serious, a force to be reckoned with, in this for real.

And if you change your ISP you do not have to change your letterhead, you can take your domain name with you, and no one will notice the change.

Domain names are even an ego trip....

Step One
E/Mail Addresses go with Domain Names

There are several conventions for E/Mail, examples:

• fred@fred.co.uk.
• Fred@compuserve.com.
• plavin@caversham.win-uk.net
• fus287@aol.com

The ISP may let you have several mailboxes so that members of your family or office can each have their own private mailbox. Or more often, they give you just the one POP3 mailbox and you can choose your own names like Sales, Info, Richard or whatever, and any messages end up in the same place.

Step two.
Why are you not happy with the standard offering.

ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Richard_Waller

It is, possibly, long and ugly on purpose, to persuade you to give up and take the proper business options and pay more money. No one has much credibility with a site name like that. The Search Engines think they are just vanity pages; they will not come looking for you, you have to kick them.

If you are on Compuserve Ourworld, you can avoid the long an tedious URL by using a free service. Just use http://go.ourworld.nu/yourCISnamewhatever/ The system will insert the rest of the URL for you.

If you want a more civilised name you cannot do it on Ourworld. You have to look elsewhere. What you can do is pay a small sum of money per year to an organisation who will give you a neater URL and E/Mail address, and forward web accesses and messages to your other site. This has all the advantages of a domain name at less cost. There are even sites that will do it free in return for advertising on your site. Choose the name you want with the supplied endname. Try:

http://go.ourworld.nu/
giving a short domain name of yourcompany.ourworld.nu free for Compuserve Classic
http://namesecure.com/
http://www.forevermail.com/
http://www.pobox.com
http://www.ukdomains.net
http://www.nic-names.co.uk
http://www.simplynames.co.uk

Or you can move to another ISP that does offer a better style of name. But take care. You have to ask exactly what your new name will look like. Or compromise and stay on Compuserve for the forums and messaging, and sign up with another ISP to host your website. Each ISP has its own conventions for a standard address, some of which are quite civilised. Examples:

• www.netlink.co.uk/users2/waller/ (Potential problems with users2)
• www.btinternet.com/~keith.williams/ (note the ~ character)
• dialspace.dial.pipex.com/euroaspa/ (actually the dialspace can be abbreviated to ds.)
• www.TechTrans.zetnet.co.uk

ISPs who use Unix servers will normally give you a name with a ~ tilde and this is particularly unfortunate as visitors to your site will always have difficulty finding the tilde key. Avoid names with a tilde!

In general I would prefer not to have a name in several stages. Robots in search engines are said to give multi-stage names lower priority. My golf club is on www.waller.co.uk/Bletchingley/Golfclub/ which is neat but its only real advantage is that it has not cost them any money.

I do not know what your chosen site will give you for free. Just ask.

Here is another option. There are companies that have registered attractive domain names and now will offer these as part of your particular name. Try http://welcome.to where you can have many different domains like http://welcome.to/yourname, http://fly.to/yourname, http://come.to/yourname, etc
This service requires you to display a small banner on your homepage, or allow a brief advertising page to display before reaching your site, or allow a pop-up window.

Or try http://easy.to/remember/ which have the same more attractive (and fun) name format. This one is free.

Or try a UK.com name from http://www.nomination.net/ which I use for my Goring site http://www.Goring-by-Sea.uk.com

There is a list of such services at http://www.dnscentral.com/compare/
They also have an associate Digital Daze who are said to be good for hosting.

I am sometimes suspicious about this approach. The referencing service is yet another link in a long chain and is something else to go wrong. And in some cases the name you have chosen and have publicised does not appear on the browser address line correctly which may not be very elegant.

Step three,
Choose a name for yourself.

When quoting on your letterhead it is a good idea always to show the www. It is not now necessary to prefix this with http:// as everyone with a browser will know that bit. For the suffix you can have:
.com which gives a good international image
.co.uk which says dammit we're British
.org for non profit
.net for ISPs
.ac for academics
.gov for government.

As from mid-2001 you can have
.info - will be for general use
.biz - will be for businesses
.name - will be for individuals
.pro - will be for professionals
.museum - will be for museums
.coop - for co-operatives
.aero - for aviation

There are a stack of country suffixes including:
.eu - European

It depends on your business. I chose www.waller.co.uk because I want to promote the name of Waller in the UK. I came across one for www.Tarbert_Hotel.com which has a nice ring to it. Hints of acCOMmodation perhaps. But maybe the co.uk would be better so that at least people know what country to find you in, and if people ask you can tell them that .co is short for Cornwall.... Alternatively the name could tell people what you do. www.Netlink.co.uk is obviously something to do with linking people on the net. One site is dedicated to websites which are less than perfect and is called www.webpagesthatsuck.com Either way it it should be easy to remember. Many of the best names have now been assigned, and there will be other websites with the same name but with .com, or .org. You will have to specify some alternatives.

Or you can go the whole hog and ask for: http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk which is luckily also available as http://www.nwl.co.uk/llanfair. But note Netscape has a limit on the number of characters it can handle in a URL and this is too many. As well as having spelling challenges. If you want to surf there direct you will have to use Explorer.

For the name you can have a - (hyphen) or a _ (underscore). This means you can have, say FlexibleSpace, Flexible-Space, or Flexible_Space. What you choose is up to you. I would choose the first which is what we went with in this case.

If you want to find out more about the weird and wonderful domain suffixes that are available to anyone, check out: http://business.virgin.net/fine.art/offshore.htm

Step four
Check that your desired name is free

http://onewhois.com - to check existing owners

If you want to register the name yourself, and remember it is much easier to have your ISP do it for you, then try these:

http://www.easily.co.uk - to register, park and forward domain names at a very low price and easy to work with. Recommended.

http://register.dnscentral.com/ - to register, park and forward domain names

Other people include:
http://www.netnames.com - to locate domain .com names
http://www.allwhois.com - said to be the best check
http://www.domainnames.co.uk - to locate UK domain names

Also while I am on the subject, here is a tool for finding out the name if you only have the quad-numeric IP number:
http://mjhb.marina-del-rey.ca.us/cgi-bin/ipw.pl - IP-Who-is

Step five
See your ISP and ask for what you want.

The ISP has to certify, in the UK at least, that you are really in business. It helps if you apply with your letterhead, and show your VAT number. The ISP checks that the name is free and then applies to the country registration body by filling in a raft of boring forms. The ISP gets a fee, perhaps UKP 100, the registration body gets a fee say UKP 100 for two years, and then the ISP charges a fee for hosting, say UKP 100 per year. The fees charged vary alarmingly. There may be some special deals. Some ISP's will include a domain name in their standard business package. They say it takes three days to register, in my experience it takes three weeks because someone along the line always makes some mistakes.

The ISP may offer a domain name forwarding for Email Example: info@fred.co.uk, and keep the standard offering name for the website. This costs a lower fee per year, plus usually the costs he incurs in registering the domain name for you. This approach does protect the domain name in case you want to use it later for the website.

With Pipex we asked for a domain name and paid them real money and we ended up with www.euroaspa.com/euroaspa which is almost worse than the original; if you leave off the repeat of the name you end up in a Pipex advertising site from which there seems to be no escape.

Or they may offer a Virtual Server, which is what you want. This means that your domain name waller.co.uk is used for Email addressing AND for the website. I think this is what you need if you are serious, but some ISPs charge a very substantial premium for doing this plus a set-up charge. If they want to do this I would try elsewhere. You do have to ask. Sometimes it is not very clear from the advertising.

The domain name is yours. You paid for it. You can take it with you elsewhere whenever you wish. Behind the domain name is a dotted quad IP address like 194.73.150.1 which is assigned to you by your current host. Some people use this IP Address as their URL. I have never understood why.

The domain name will be listed on the ISP's Domain Name Server (DNS) and must also be listed on a second DNS somewhere else. The DNS references are in a hierarchy tree, starting with .com or .uk and working back up the sub-portions of the URL.

Once you have a domain name, then you need not have your site located at the place where it is registered, though it is certainly most usual to do so. For example Compuserve and AOL will not handle domain names but give you webspace. There are companies who will provide you with a forwarding service for a small fee, its sole function being to re-address any accesses to your webspace elsewhere. Once such service is http://www.dnscentral.com/ourworld/ giving a short domain name of yourcompany.ourworld.nu which costs $19/year

Web-Forwarding

1) by setting up a frame in which case the same URL will appear on the top of each page of your site which is displayed, rotten for bookmarks, concealing the fact that you are on a comic ISP with a 90-character real URL, or

2) just foward all requests to the specified page on your site and letting them see a different URL on the top of the page to the one they asked for.

Some ISPs cannot or will not forward to any page you choose, only the default page. This may be a ploy to get you to buy webspace from them.

By the way, Search engines may dislike any form of forwarding in this way, and you might be best to submit the real URL of the page you want the search engines to see. Even the people who offer forwarding with a Frame, seldom get the META tags right.

Step six
Publicise your smart new URL.