What is a domain name?
A domain name is the address of your website, or the last part of your email address. If you have a website then the domain name registrar will have details of the host nameservers. When someone types your domain name into the browser, they are automatically routed to the actual Internet address of your website.
Domain Name Registration
Cornish WebServices can, if required, provide a domain name registration service for clients using our website design or marketing services. We use a 3rd party domain registering company and always take care to register the domain with the client as the domain name owner. This is very important as transferring ownership of domains can be a lengthy and complicated business.
Domain name registration includes:
- No fee for changing nameservers (important if you change your host provider)
- No release fee (should you wish another company to look after your domain name)
- E-mail forwarding
Unless requested otherwise, we use one of our email addresses as the contact address. In our experience many clients change email addresses within 2 years and forgetting to renew your domain name in time means either losing it or paying a large fee to regain its use. In contrast to the details of domain name owner, changing contact details is quick and easy.
Domain name costs
We only register domains for clients of our website design and marketing work, and the domain name costs are included within the quotation.
Choosing a domain name
The best domain names are:
- Short
- Include the company name
- Include major keywords that potential clients may search on
- Memorable
- Available (an increasing difficulty with most short names taken)
The above list of requirements is usually impossible to satisfy completely, and so a compromise must be chosen for the best domain name(s) to use. Many businesses try to register both the .com and .co.uk domain names to avoid confusion with competitors.
Although having major keywords within your domain name is beneficial to natural search engine optimisation (SEO), this is only one small part of SEO and should not be the only criterion for choosing a domain name.
Domain names and branding
If you have a well known company name, then using this in your domain name makes good sense, as your website will be easily identified and your company name strengthened.
For businesses and organisations with a less well known name, choosing a generic domain name that describes the product or service you offer will help market your website in the sort term. But this will be at the expense of longer-term branding or recognition of your business or organisation name. The best choice depends upon your overall objectives.
Choosing a Domain Name Registrar
A Domain Name Registrar is a company that can sell domain names. To do so it will be accredited by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to sell top level domain names or gFTDs (generic top level domains) such as .com, .org., .net and .biz.
Within the UK, the .uk domain name registry is Nominet UK. This is a not for profit company. Unusually compared to other countries, Nominet does not normally handle domain name registrations directly, but uses 3rd parties or 'tag holders' .
Almost anyone can become a 'tag-holder'. There is fierce competition and many domain name specialist companies offer good value with no transfer out fee. Various ISP's, hosting companies and website design companies are also 'tag holders' and can register domains. Be careful about very high 'transfer out fees' and slow levels of service and poor quality setups with such companies.
We recommend using a domain name only company for registering your domain name - we have used Virtual Names for many years, as well as other companies. Some other companies appear to offer the cheapest deals by selling email addresses.
Once you have selected a company to register your domain name do not be tempted by their hosting offers. In our experience good domain name companies offer poor quality hosting provision and vice versa.
