Starting a Website – Domain Names

“It’s all in the name” is an expression that is actually quite relevant for businesses and websites alike. With websites, the wrong name can be a killer for getting subscribers or users. It can also be a liability if you choose something that is copyrighted/trademarked such as Facebook©™ has done.

First, what is a domain name? Your domain name is the name of your website and is used for the URL of the website address. Our domain name is bryzar.com and our main URL is https://www.bryzar.com . That’s how people find us and it’s a nice, short URL.

This blog is in a subdomain, blog.bryzar.com . You can see it is still part of our main domain name (website name). You can think of domains as the apartment building and subdomains as apartments in the building. The main postal address of the building is how the postman finds where to bring the mail and then he/she puts it in a box for the apartments in the building. That’s a very simple explanation and subdomains are a bit more complex, but that’s still a good way to visualize it.

Since your domain name is one of the most important things for your website, we’ve put together some tips to help you choose one.

** KISS (Keep it Short and Simple). The K.I.S.S. method might be one you’ve heard before. With domain names, it can be one of the best things to remember. The shorter your domain name is, the easier it should be for people to remember it and type it in.

Long names are a turn off and also can wreak havoc with website design as they can throw things off balance and cause issues on mobile devices. If you can find a domain name that is short and still relevant to your niche, that’s a great start. Just remember, it’s much easier to type and recall something such as greatsite.com than it is something like thisismyawesomewonderfulwebsiteonlinenow-withmybestfriend.com .

** Be very wary of copyright/trademark infringement. Facebook has both Face and Book copyrighted. They aren’t the only company with copyrights or trademarks that are strictly enforced. Your best bet is to research names you want to use via the trademark and copyright offices for your location.

** Once you have some ideas, you need to research to see if that domain name is available. This is where domain registrars come in handy. There are many registrars out there and we expect to offer domain registration in upcoming features. What is a registrar?  From Wikipedia:

A domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity that manages the reservation of Internet domain names.

Each domain must be registered and it must be unique. As such, you might find it difficult to find a .com domain name. Many today are moving away from the .com to other top level domains. More details about top level domains(TLD) can be found here.  You can actually get fairly creative with your domain name and your TLD. Such as, using the .us or .book, or other TLDs in creative ways (Examples: read.me, allmy.tech, etc).

We hope you’ve found this article helpful. It’s part two in our Starting a Website series. You might want to print out each tutorial and use them as a checklist when planning and setting up your website. If you have any questions, feel free to ask at our ScriptTechs forum.