In: Root » » Search engines » Understanding How to Get Your Site Online
Before you can make a new Web site available on the Internet, it must first be assigned its own special Web address, which is commonly referred to as the domain name. The process of acquiring a domain name can be a fun adventure and only requires a little bit of work. To start with, someone needs to think of a good name for the site and then check to see whether that name is available for use or whether it has already been taken. If the desired name is available, the name needs to be registered, and that can be done either through a domain registrar or a host provider. After the domain name is registered, the site needs a hosting plan so that it can reside on a server and thus become available to the public. All of this needs to be done before you can publish the site. Most people like to register the domain and get a hosting plan at the start of any new Web project to ensure that the domain name is secure during the site-building process. And, because building a site takes a good bit of time, most folks also like to have a customized placeholder page designed and uploaded to the domain until the new Web site is ready for publishing. If you are working as a freelance Web designer, some of your Web clients will have already registered their domain and secured a hosting plan before contacting you about your design services. Other new clients, however, will not have done any of these things and will need a fair amount of handholding from you as you take them through each of the steps. Being able to provide information about these topics to your clients can both enrich your skills as a Web professional and enhance their experience with you as a designer. This fact alone can be very good for business because happy clients are more likely to return to you for Web site maintenance services after their site gets published, as well as refer other friends and business acquaintances to you if they feel confident in all your Web-related skills. If this is your first time dealing with domain names and hosting plans, you may want to try setting up a domain name and hosting plan for your own Web site before handling these tasks for any Web clients. Selecting a Domain Name Choosing a domain name for a Web site is something that you, in your role as a designer, may or may not be involved in when working with Web clients, depending on their individual needs and how Web-savvy they are. Some Web clients will have already selected a domain, registered it, and secured hosting, whereas others will say they don’t really understand anything about all that stuff and are relying on your experience to help them figure it all out, or in some cases do it all for them because they don’t care to know. Some clients, of course, will fall somewhere in between these extremes, needing a little help with some but not all of these domain-related responsibilities. In the following sections, you find out more about domain names, how to help select a domain name for your client, and then how to check to make sure the name is available. Understanding what a domain name is Simply put, a domain name is a name that is used to identify an address on the Internet for a particular Web site and any e-mail addresses configured for that site, such as http://www.cleanfordreams.com and info@www.cleanfordreams.com. The Web address itself is composed of four distinct parts. Protocol: The first part of a Web address, http://, is the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which identifies the protocol that allows a computer to browse the Web by getting information from a remote server. Secure access to the Internet (that is, anytime a domain has an SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] certificate installed on the host server for encrypting private data) requires the use of the https:// (note the s for secure) protocol. www: The second part refers to the World Wide Web and identifies the type of page that will be delivered in a browser window. You might notice that some sites still display in your browser without the www part of the address, such as typing just google.com into your browser’s address bar instead of www.google.com, but that function is typically server dependent and isn’t a universal feature of domain names. Another type of Web address includes domains where the www is omitted, such as in http://maps.google.com. This type of address refers to a subsite or subdomain that resides on the main domain’s servers but is separate from it. Domain name: The third part identifies the unique name of the Web site as registered by the owner of the site. Domain names may contain any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. In addition, though less often used, domain names may also include hyphens but no other special characters, as in www.Jet-StreamShowerhead.net. Extension: The fourth part identifies the type of site visitors should expect to see at the address, such as .com for commercial business sites, .org for nonprofit organizations, and .edu for educational sites. Although several unrestricted domain extensions are in use by all kinds of businesses around the world, the most familiar extensions should really be used as they were intended. For example, the .org extension should be used for nonprofit organizations, and the .gov extension should be used exclusively for government agencies. |
legal disclaimer
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Web-articles is a free articles resource.
Suggestion: If you need fresh, daily updated content for your website, feel free to use our service. Click here for more information.
related articles
Getting into Google This article is about getting your site to appear on Google search pages. I’m not talking about the Google Directory, submission to which is a simple matter also covered here. The challenge is to appear in search results based on keywords related to your site. Articles 3 and 4 focus on becoming more prominently placed on those search results pages; this article is more elementary but no less crucial for new sites. The Three-Step Process Many of the suggestions, tactics, and concepts ...
This article is about partnering with Google: getting into the index, improving your PageRank, advertising on Google, distributing other people’s Google ads on your site, and other ways of building your online business through Google. So a section about rebuffing Google might seem counterproductive. But in the interest of covering all bases, here it is. Sometimes even publicity-hungry Webmasters want to keep Google away from certain parts of their business. Private pages designed for friends and semiprivate ...
3. Optimizing a Site for Google
The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is both simple and complex. It’s simple in that the principles of preparing your site for beneficial crawling are a lot easier than SEO companies (who want you as a client) might have you believe. It’s also complex because ideal SEO goes beyond tweaking a site’s tags or page structure to a deeper consideration of a site’s purpose, who it wants to attract, and how it wants visitors to behave. SEO might or might not be connected to making money. (Fo...
4. Putting Google Search on Your Site
The simplest and most identifiable method of partnering with Google is to incorporate Google searching on your site. You may offer Google search to your visitors free of charge (to them and to you), and you may customize the search to a reasonable degree. Giving your users options to search the Web or your site (or other specific sites) is fairly easy. Google offers four free search services and three paid services: - Google Free. A Google-branded search box that delivers Web results. ...
5. Introducing Search Advertising and Google AdWords
This first article on AdWords is an overview of both search advertising in theory and AdWords in practice. I sketch the main points of Google’s service here, and get into the details in later articles. Search advertising brings new marketing propositions to the table. This is not to say that search advertising is brand new, but it is reaching a tipping point (to borrow author Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase). Nobody knows what we are tipping into. But there’s no question that search adve...
6. Understanding How AdWords Works
As a preview, the following list outlines the basic steps of designing and running ads in Google, in roughly the order in which most people proceed: - Start an account. Starting an AdWords account is pain-free and expensefree. You don’t even have to be certain that you’ll ever run a single ad. Opening the account simply lets you into Google’s AdWords staging area, called the Control Center, where you create and deploy campaigns. No ads are displayed, and no billin...
7. Creating Effective Ad Groups
Ad Groups are the fundamental marketing units that propel your AdWords campaign. If keywords are the sparks of AdWords success, Ad Groups are the flames. And, one hopes, your campaign is a roaring bonfire. But forget the heated analogy. The point is that success in AdWords depends largely on the effective creation and manipulation of Ad Groups. Why is the Ad Group the most powerful element of your campaign? Because it contains the four motors of your advertising and conversion strategy: ads, keywords, bid...
8. AdWords bid on keywords
The Control Center provides three ways to edit the crucial CPC (cost-per-click) bid. This is the bid that helps determine your ad’s position on search pages. Normally, the bid applies to all keywords in an Ad Group, but you may also specify unique bids for individual keywords. Following are the three methods of tweaking your CPC bid: - Using the Edit Keywords link. I describe this method in the preceding section, in the discussion about editing keywords. The same screen allows keyword ed...