You may be asking yourself “How do I start my own website?”.  Well, for starters:  What do you want your website to portray?  Thoughtful consideration of your website’s future direction will help you in deciding on the optimum domain name for your site.  Careful consideration of your website’s domain name can pay off in dividends once your website is published online. Fine tuning your choice and thinking it through will help secure good placement with search engines and in the minds of your potential visitors/customers.

OK, so now you’ve found the domain name you want, but someone else owns it.  Can you still get it?  Possibly.  It’s possible, but with conditions to consider.  However, with a little luck and enginuity you can get the domain name you want even if it is already spoken for.  But for now, lets look at some alternatives to getting that domain name you want:

Hyphenated Names One strategy to consider if the domain name you want is already taken would be to hyphenate it, as in turning ricksantiqueshop.com into ricks-antique-shop.com.  Is hyphenating the best way to go?  Maybe, maybe not.  For example, if the domain name you want is already taken AND well known, most likely this is not a good idea, because most web surfers would likely just type the non-hyphenated version into their browsers and thus could end up at your competitor’s website.  Not what you were after!  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 keep it short.  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?  You can purchase domain names up to 67 characters in length.  At 63 characters, thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensome
andthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the longest domain name in the world, and it may very well be.  Who would want to type it into a 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  The answer here is it depends.  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.  Budweiser.com is a site that is well known and gets a lot of traffic, even though there is nothing specifically in the domain name that says anything about beer.  But because Budweiser is known all over the world as a beer brand, people know what they are getting when they surf to the website.  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.  Research your domain name as thoroughly as you can, including looking for generic keywords which could be a good fit as a potential domain name.  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.