It is far more important to me to help you in establishing your organizations presence and identity on the Internet, rather than blitzing you with snappy sales pitches and fancy jargon. It is my goal to keep you informed by discussing topics related to the current state of the art as it pertains to web site design, development, management and promotion. If you are interested in a web site or simply want to know more about what I do the read on.

Domain Names

First lets briefly examine your domain name. Your domain name should be one that can easily be remembered. That is the point in a nut shell. A domain name is a nice, but un-necessary service you provide to the public to assist them in finding your website. So how does anything find your site without a name?

Well, at the most basic level, everything on the Internet has an address. The address is known as the IP address, where “I” stands for Internet and “P” stands for protocol. Protocol in this case, is nothing more than an standard form of communication like a language or a method of translation that we all agree on. So if you knew of a web site’s IP address like like Goolgle’s 64.233.187.99 you could simply type http://64.233.187.99 in your favorite web browser’s address bar and go directly to Google’s home page.

Now, we don’t want to memorize all those numbers, so someone dreamed up the idea of using a name to point to those numbers instead. Basically, you register your domain name for a fee and you get to decide what address that name points to. There is a couple of technical details here that I am purposely leaving out to keep this short, but from most peoples point of view this will suffice.

What’s in a name? Most organizations will want their formal name or some keywords related to their business, location in their domain name. Although this is not a bad idea, it’s not something to get upset about if all the possible combinations are taken. Here again I will mention the most successful dot com to illustrate my point: Google.com What is a google anyway? Never the less, it is generally a good idea, if you can get your business name dot com, then do so!

Hosting

Now let’s talk about the other part of your domain, the host. Now that you have your name where will you point it? Should you just point it to your IP address at your business? That is probably not a good idea unless you or your staff are capable of maintaining such Internet connections. Furthermore, there must be a web server Hosting your website at that address. Most websites are hosted by a web hosting company. They normally offer inexpensive packages on a monthly or annual basis. Packages are priced based on the amount of storage space alloted to you, usage (called throughput) your site incurs and development tools such as databases and programming languages…. (more to come)