Choosing the right domain name

A lot of people don’t pay as much attention to their domain name as they probably should. People will make a judgement regarding your website before they even visit it, the domain name or URL (Universal Resource Locator) can attract or deter visitors so it is well worth spending time choosing it, after all it is the first thing that the search engines come across when they crawl.

Often businesses will choose to include their name in the URL, such as www.confused.com but without the huge advertising budget would it be easy to work out what this site does without visiting it?

Some sites, especially those that specialise in a certain area will use those keywords in their chosen domain name, this is exactly what we will be doing with our guide to the Norfolk Broads website. Quite a while ago we secured www.norfolkbroadsguide.co.uk and this is the domain name that we will be developing the new site on. Yes it is slightly longer than we would have probably liked but it does contain important keywords and I like to think it is also easy to understand what the site will have to offer even before people visit it, It should also be easy to remember so branding should not be an issue.

I used www.123-reg.co.uk to search for and purchase the domain, another site that may be of interest when searching for a domain name is www.nameboy.com this allows you search for a domain using keywords that you would like to be included in the URL.

Now that we have chosen the domain name we need to decide if we are going to code the site from scratch or use a CMS (Content Management System). We’ll cover that in a future post.