How to build a website

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who are ready to give up on their web idea because the domain name they had in mind is not available. It’s true, many good names are taken and if you had a fantasy about registering dogs.com for your new blog, you missed that boat about 15 years ago. However, I always quickly point out that most web sites you use every day were not household words when they started. Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist. I’m sure the founders of Google would have liked to launch their site as search.com but it wasn’t available so they had to make do. Well which would you rather own right now, google.com or search.com.

The point is, there are many good domains out there that are unregistered you just need to be creative.

So…

Rule #1 is don’t panic. There are plenty of names you can find that will work. But you will have to be creative. Mixing and matching words. Using funny endings. Make up words. Put combinations of words together. You will find something that works

Rule #2 is make sure you domain is easy to spell and easy to remember. When you’re at a cocktail party you are going to want to tell people about your great web site. And you’re going to want them to check it out when they get home and hopefully tell their friends. I don’t like hyphens or numbers in domains if that can be avoided. Avoid words that are hard to spell. Try it on a few friends before you commit and ask them how they would spell that.

Rule #3 Google and other search engines do appear to give some credit for the words in your domain name so it is worth considering if your site is about dog walking and you want people to find your site when the search on “dog walking” (E.g. dogwalkingrules.com) you may try to use those words in the domain. This is not a hard rule, just a suggestion to think about.

Rule #4 There are many domain squatters out there sitting on good domain names. This is annoying but it is a reality of the internet. What they do is buy up lots of names for about $10 / year from a domain registrar and then sit on them. They run ads on the sites to earn revenue while they wait for a buyer to come along and purchase the domain for a much higher price. You can find some good names from these folks and if you are unable to come up with anything available it is possible to find a good name for anywhere from a few hundred dollars to up to a few thousand. I would never recommend paying more than a few thousand for a domain name unless you know you are going to build a huge multi million dollar brand. The only exception to this is if the domain already gets a lot of traffic. That is a different story but in most cases it makes more sense to find a name for cheap and use the money to drive traffic to your site. Since traffic is ultimately what will make you rich and famous

Rule #5 The days of people putting random words in the browser and adding .com are over. If someone wants to find information about dogs these days they likely start by entering a search into Google not by randomly putting dogs.com in their browser bar. More on search engine optimization later but remember there are domains out there and thanks to Google and other search engines, the name of your site is a lot less important since people will find you in other ways.

In thinking of the name for this site I tried a lot of combinations. howtobuildasite.com, websitetutorial.com, stepbystepwebsite.com. I knew the site was going to be a guide to help people build their own web site so as I tried different combinations I finally found one I liked and that was available. I registered the domain at namebargain.com for $9.48 per year and the process of finding a name and registering it took about an hour. So it can be done with little time and very little money and that is step 1 in launching a web site.