If you are planning on launching your own website, once you decide what the heck you are going to put on it, you’ll need to get a domain name. This article is on how to buy a domain only. Trying to choose a good one is another matter altogether.

Firstly, if you are a complete and utter newbie when it comes to the creation of a website, you might not even know what I am talking about. A domain is the “label” for your website, the way it is identified in a browser and makes up the URL that people use to link to it. The www is NOT part of the domain name, though. So some domain names would be google.com or yahoo.com. For this site, the domain name is become-an-online-writer.com. Yes, I know it’s too long.

So how to you get one? The term is “register”, and it’s not that difficult at all. There are countless places online, called registrars. The cost can run anything from a few dollars per year, to quite a bit more. How much you pay is up to you, but the higher priced places are usually offering more bells and whistles along with the name. I pay around $15US per year for mine at directNIC. Nice, simple and cheap. Or you can just go to a search engine and search for “domain registrars”.

All you need to do is visit a registrar site and select the name you want, including the .com or .org or .net extension on the end. The registrar will let you know if it’s already taken. That can be a big stumbling block, finding a name that no one else has bought already. You can test out your names at Better Whois. Just type it in, and you can find out if the name is available or reserved. If the name is not taken, you provide your personal information (name, address, email) along with some form of payment, usually credit card or Paypal. Voila, that’s it. You now own the domain name of your dreams. You will have to renew your registration each year.

How you turn this into a live, functioning website is a topic for another day. If you have an idea for a website but not the time, energy or money to actually make it a reality, you can still register the domain. Better to have it on hand for an upcoming project, rather than finally get around to it someday and find it snatched up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under Website Creation. 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.