So, you’re ready to get started on your website.  Hiring a web designer as we discussed before is beneficial for many reasons.  One reason is that they will understand the whole “setting up” process.  But it is always good to know what you are talking about when discussing this information with your Web Designer. 

The first step to a website should always be your domain name.  The internet is rapidly growing and millions of new websites are created every year.  With this in mind, we want to be able to puchase the perfect domain name for our group, ministry, or organization.  Sometimes this is not possible, but we hope to walk you through the process of finding the one that’s closest to perfect.

First of all, we need to understand exactly what a domain name is and what it does. 

Dicitonary.com defines it as the following:

domain name
n.
A series of alphanumeric strings separated by periods, such as http://www.hmco.com, that is an address of a computer network connection and that identifies the owner of the address.

Wikipedia.com defines it a little more simpler:

Domain names are hostnames that provide more easily memorable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses.

Let’s remember the term “easily memorable” for later. 

An example of a domain name would be:  southernspin.com

Domain names are used in URLS to direct the user to a specific page. A URL is “A Uniform Resource Locator (URL). It is a string of characters conforming to a standardized format, which refers to a resource on the Internet (such as a document or an image) by its location.”

An example of a URL using a domain name would be:  http://www.southernspin.com

A URL made up of your domain name and an HTTP code is called a WEB ADDRESS.

A domain name is broken down into levels.  The levels are divided by a period (.) and are assigned numerically from right to left.  The top or first level is the ending portion of the domain name (ie. COM, ORG, NET, etc.) The second level is the unique name of the site (ex. southernspin of southernspin.com) A third level domain would be: blog.southernspin.com .  More than three or four levels of a domain name are uncommon, but they do occur. 

In order to give your group, ministry, or organization validity you need a domain name.  No more FREE sites.  From the little or much surfing you do on the net, looking at the two domain names below, which would you find to be more credible?

adhd.com

adhd.kids.tripod.com

Which of the above domain names will be easier to advertise?

Now that we’ve looked at what a domain is and does, our next topic will be Finding the Perfect Domain Name

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