Website 101:
Basic Information About Websites

Domain Name Registration

The name of a website is called the domain name. This is what follows the www. It consists of two parts, the name and the suffix. In the case of this site, the name is circlewebworks and the suffix is .com.

There are a limited number of suffixes. In the United States most people use the .com (company), .org (organization) or .net (network) suffixes. Also available are suffixes for every other country in the world, and a few new ones (.biz, .info, .us, .name).

A good domain name is easy to spell, easy to remember, and very easy to verbalize. If you have to tell someone the name of your site, it shouldn't be hard to do. Say you want a site named I love rocks. You find that iloverocks.com is taken. So is .net, and .org. You might think that i-love-rocks.com would be a good alternative. But that name is not easy to verbalize. You would have to tell people, "Go to I dash love dash rocks dot com." Probably most people are going to say, "What?" And the rest of the people are going to end up going to iloverocks.com.

You cannot buy a website name. You register a name for a year or more at a time. It's called domain name registration. Domain name registration is coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Many other companies act as registration providers.

Domain name registration reserves the name for your use. Your registration delineates a series of contact names. There's the name and the contact information for the registrant, the person or organization who is going to use the name. Then there are also listings for an administrative, technical, and billing contact person. Your registration also specifies what server to look for to find your web page.

Every web page is stored on a computer called a web server. When you type www.circlewebworks.com into your browser, or click on a link that takes you to our page, our domain name registration "Name Server" listing is what tells your browser to find the page on our server.

To find out if a domain name is available, you can go to any registration provider and enter the name you want in their search box. It will return information indicating whether or not the domain is already registered. Network Solutions is one such site.

There are many companies on the web who will register a domain name for you. Prices range from less than $10 to $35 a year. There is usually a discount for registering a name for more than one year at a time.

At CircleWebWorks we prefer to work with a registration provider we have found to be very reliable. Their cost for domain registration is $15 a year, and we pass this cost along to you without a markup.

If you would prefer you can register your own domain name. Please be sure to make a note of your domain registration account username and password. Losing this information can make for quite an irritating adventure later on.

You don't need any of the extras they try to sell you when you register a domain name. You don't need to buy email or hosting services from your registration company. You also don't need to buy any extra domain locking or security service. Email and hosting services are available through your web hosting provider. Find out more about web hosting here.

Not all registration companies operate ethically. Some make it virtually impossible for you to move your registration to a different provider. Some companies send out what look like renewal notices, even though they are not your registration provider. Fall for it, send them money, and they will switch your registration account to their service without you even realizing it.

We suggest letting a web professional handle your domain name registration.

If you are interested in speaking with CircleWebWorks about registering a domain name, please contact us.