Web Solutions - Comprehensive and Free

Step 1 - Choosing (and getting) your web address.

First you need to decide what's  the web address of your website. This is the www.SomeNameYouChose.com , where you can chose the "SomeNameYouChose" and if you would like it to be a .com, .net, .biz, .tv, .us  etc.  This is not as simple as you might think, since now days it will be difficult to find a name that is not already being used by someone. But here are a few tips.

Example: www.SomeNameYouChose.com

Terminology - the "www." we ignore for now. "SomeNameYouChose" we'll call "the name" and the ".com" part we'll call "the extension".

• The extension. The most common website extension is ".com" because it was the first one, and the only one used for commercial sites for a long time until a few years ago. If the name you want for your site is not available (I'll explain in a sec) you might consider a different extension, as .info, .us, etc. These extensions are completely "kosher" although will not be the first choice for anyone looking for your site just by it's name since they'll instinctively try the .com extension first.

• The Name. The name, which go usually between the "www." and the ".com" parts, is the tricky part. Most common and, now days, uncommon words and phrases are already taken, especially ones with the ".com" extension. If you make up new words,  like escalavator (see Popeye for reference) you can be lucky and find that it's free for use with the .com extension. Basic rules for a name are that you can use only letters, numbers, or hyphen ("-"), the name cannot begin or end with a hyphen and must have less than 63 characters (recommended not more than 26 characters).

One of the best websites you can use  to find out if a name is available, to check what extensions exist and are available and to find out who owns the website name you wanted to register is www.register.com. . Click here to go there and to help support this website.