Internet Marketing is Nuts!

Choosing a Domain Name That Will Brand Your Website

You may be asking yourself “How do I start my own website?”.  Well, for starters:  One of the best things you can help yourself with in your domain name choice is to develop a strategy and plan of attack.  One of the best things you can do for your fledgling website is to bestow it with an appropriate, catchy, easy to remember domain name. Good search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with domain name selection.  Not to mention your positioning and branding with your customer.

What if someone already owns the domain name you covet?  Can you still get it?  It’s Possible.  It’s possible, but with conditions to consider.  However, with a little luck and enginuity you can still possibly register that coveted domain name even if someone has beaten you to the punch.  Instead, let’s check out some alternative strategies to get the domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names Sometimes it is a good strategy to just take the same domain name and hyphenate it as in turning bobsautoparts.com into bobs-auto-parts.com.  Is it always the best strategy?  Maybe, maybe not.  If you want a domain name that is already taken by someone else and is already a well known, well traveled website, this might be a bad move, because users already familiar with the original domain name will just type the original, non-hyphenated version into their web browser, and end up not at your site but at your competitor’s site.  Not the desired result!  Also, the longer the name you have chosen, the more tedious and error prone it becomes for the surfer to type in the name correctly, again foiling the chances that they will end up at your website.  So, the shorter the better.  Hyphenating a domain name might be a good strategy for you in the following scenario: Let’s say the domain name you want is taken, and the current owner is not willing to give it up.  After researching it you find that there is no website published under the domain name, or perhaps there is but it is poorly designed and gets very little traffic.  In a case like that hyphenating the domain name might make sense and in fact could be a wise strategy.  But be careful:  the last thing you want is to cause internet domain name confusion because you have decided on a domain name registration that is so close to a major competitor’s name that you end up losing business to them.

Longer or Shorter?  Domain names can be up to 67 characters long.  At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be.  Can you envision anyone wanting to type it into their browser?  My website is www.StartYourWebsiteToday.com  and has a domain name that tells what kind of website you will be surfing to.  Good name selection can be helpful also with search engine ranking.  You will want to definitely keep the name as short and sweet as possible, but at the same time let the visitor know what to expect when he surfs to your website.  Keep it as short as possible.

Brand Name or Generic  Should you give your website a descriptive generic name or do you want to use a brand name?  If your business is known by a brand name, and it is a well known name, of course it is the best possible strategy to try to register that domain name.  For instance, Nike.com is a well known brand name site, although there is nothing in the domain name to suggest that it is a site about shoes.  Still, Nike is such a well known brand name to the public that people automatically know what they will be shopping for when they get there.  If your brand name is well known, definitely try to obtain your brand name as a domain name.  But if your company is Nike or Coca Cola or Budweiser don’t discount the idea of buying the domain name shoes.com or soda.com or beer.com if they are available as well.  People often search the web using generic terms, more so even than brand names.  A person is more likely to search the internet with generic terms like shoes or footwear or sneakers than to search by a single brand name, even one as big as Nike.  So if possible cover all the bases.  You can have as many domain names as you want pointing to a single website, so the more generic terms you can acquire that directly describe your business, the better.   A generic name if your business is new or not yet well known can get great results, if you can find a good one.  To start your search for your own unique domain name, here is a link to a domain name search engine.  So in conclusion, the first step in “how to start a website” is in the wise choice of your domain name. 

Choosing a Hosting Plan for Your New Website

Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages.  Which brings the subject of hosting into play:  Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers.  Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.

UPTIME  Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime.  That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.

SIZE  How large will the website be?  Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  Which operating system should your hosting plan use?  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  What programming language was used in the Web site design?  For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan.  Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.

TRAFFIC  How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly?  Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage.  The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost.  Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software.  Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup.  The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

Types of Web Hosting

There are several kinds of web site hosting available for sites on the web and depending on the type of business or site you have, will settle the sort of hosting that you will need. Indeed there are many numerous assorted sites that extend non-paying web pages or web sites for people although they normally only provide a page or two with the ability to upload pictures. They are also very user friendly so you won’t have to become a computer wiz kid to use one of these servers.

When you consider a site like MySpace for example, where you can design a web site there that is completely non-paying. You can add pictures, blogs, message boards, videos and even music with the only restriction being that it is for social uses only, or is supposed to be. This is a good instance of a free site, but meantime, MySpace utilizes your web pages to place their own advertisements. Obviously you will be restricted on space, what kind of substance you can post, and naturally the web site does not belong to your, but belongs to Myspace. Should you wish to sell merchandise online – you can employ a inexpensive shared server that gives you an chance to create your website at no charge and many even provide guides. You will have to purchase a domain name naturally, for example, myfavouritethings.com, and you will have to register the domain and then have access to upload your web site on the shared server.

In the case of a free common server, you will be sharing your web site with other web sites, but you will be limited to storage space as well as the amount of information you can transfer at any one time. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to receive thousands of individuals visit your website in an hour as it will require too much of the servers bandwidth. This is often the best answer for tiny Internet business that trades very few merchandise online even though meantime, your web site will in all probability have a number of ads that are arranged on there by the provider to earn the revenue required to look after your site. A common server on the other hand is just like a non-paying server except you have to pay a little bit every month to maintain your website. You will probably have more control when it comes to ads and could even generate revenue by signing up for Google AdSense adverts to be put on your site, even though you will still need to come up with a domain.

 A dedicated server holds only your website and no others so you can have as much space you need to make your website as big as you wish. You will have adequate bandwidth to accommodate all the traffic you can get, and have total control over the ads that you position on your web site. The alternative is a dedicated server which is the best in website hosting because you are in reality hosting your own web site and you have sufficient space, bandwidth and freedom to do whatever you wish. These servers, while costing more money to use, in reality end up saving you money, or adding to your income, if used in the correct manner.