If you are a start up, work from home, “mumpreneur” or any other 21st Century “new age business”, it’s likely that your website will be your primary marketing vehicle and shop window.

As far as “buying” it – you don’t actually buy it. You effectively lease the rights for sole use for a specific period. If you don’t pay the renewal fee – the domain will “drop” (watch for a future article) and the website and email attached to it will stop working.

Remember, some domains are valuable and it is worth paying for more than one year and making a note of when it expires – so you don’t lose it.

It is obviously a vital choice. Something you need to get right – so which domain to buy?

If you are a solo professional or 1 person business, you should always register your own name .com and preferably .net. If you are outside the US, get the country top level domain also. So in the UK – this would be .co.uk

Registering your own name will stop so called “cyber squatters” putting up site and asking you for a lot of money to buy it off them.

If you head a small business, think about registering your business name as follows.

1. Remember the “phone test” – Think about how you would explain your website or email over the phone. (Maybe to someone who doesn’t speak english as a native language). As a rule of thumb, if you think you are likely to run into trouble… You will…

2. Don’t worry about hyphens. There are theories that they are not liked by search engines. But as few people are party to what search engines like and don’t like, you can think of hyphens to just break up words.

3. Be careful what words you put together which normally have a space in between them. These can make the domain harder to remember and pronounce. Not what you want.

4. The shorter the better, As a general rule – short is easy to brand and fit round a logo. If possible under 10 characters.

5. Think about who you chose as your registrar. All companies offering domain registration should be registered with ICANN. But if you ever want to sell the domain, if it is not registered with one of the main players, your chances of selling it are likely to be less.
Also, some registrars will offer you cheap first year and then be more expensive afterwards. Think strategically as to how long you intend to keep the domain for.

6. You don’t have to get your hosting from the same place as your domain. Registrars will often give you a cheap domain but make up the shortfall on hosting. Don’t be taken in, again be strategic in your thinking.