If you are creating a personal site, you do not necessarily need your own domain name, but it is always a good idea if you’re creating a site for a business. The domain name is the part of the name you commonly see after the www in a site address. For example, Wrox Press uses the domain name wrox.com, whereas Amazon uses the domain name amazon.com in the U.S., amazon.co.uk in the U.K., amazon.de in Germany, and so on (although, as you might have noticed, some sites do not use the www in their name).
You can register your domain name with a domain registration company, of which there are hundreds; just search on your favorite search engine and you will find plenty. Most companies go for the suffix .com, but several other suffixes are available. For example, there are country-specific domain suffixes (also known as top-level domains) such as .co.uk for the UK, .de for Germany, .com.au for Australia, and .ru for Russia. You should choose a country-specific domain only if you are based in that country.
Indeed, some domain names (such as .com.au domains) can be bought only by people with registered companies or companies with products by that name being sold in that country. Then there are also suffixes such as .me.uk, which is for personal sites; .info, which is for information-based sites; and .org, which is for registered organizations.
You do not need all available suffixes for your domain name, although you should make sure that your site is not very similar in name to someone you would not want to be associated with, just in case the user mistypes. For example, you would not want a children’s site to have a very similar URL to an adult-content site.
Before you register your name, you need to see if it is available; all domain name registration companies should have a form that allows you to search to see if your domain name is available. You might find this a frustrating process, as an incredibly high proportion of the .com domain names you might think of have been taken already, as well as most popular words (even combinations of popular words). Many numbers have also been taken.
You can order a domain name without actually having a site ready; this is sometimes known as domain parking. You order the name as soon as you know you are going to create the site (after all, you will probably want to use the URL in the site design, and will therefore need to order it before you start designing the site), but you do not put anything up there until you have built the site.
Several domain-name registration companies also offer hosting, but there is no need to order your domain name from the same people that host your site; you can get the domain name registration company to point the domain to your hosting company’s servers (usually there is a simple control panel on the site you registered the name with where you control where your domain name actually points).
Your domain name should be easy to remember. Avoid names that are so long that users will find it hard to remember or too long to type in. For example, if you were called the Sydney Slate Roofing Services Limited, you might choose a domain such as www.SydneySlate.com rather than www.SydneySlateRoofingServicesLimited.com.
When you register the domain name, you will also likely be able to use this for your e-mail addresses. For example, if you choose the domain www.example.com, then no one else will be able to use the e-mail address bob@example.com without your permission (although it is possible for spammers to make e-mails appear as if they come from your domain, simply by changing the “from” address in their e-mail programs).
