1.2 Naming Your Site

The first thing your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than donethese days. All the best words in the dictionary have either already beenbought and built by developers or they’ve been bought and offered byspeculators.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a good name and buy it for a song.Putting two words together with a hyphen can work (likehttp://www.adsense-tools.com/) and there are plenty of good namesavailable if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .net and.biz etc.

Your first stop should be to register a domain name and order a hosting plan.One of my favorite sites to do this is Globat. They frequently offer excellentspecials, such as free or reduced hosting for a year. Click here to see theirlatest offer.

Another stop is Network Solutions. This is a nuts and bolts service that letsyou hunt and buy names, order hosting plans and even submit your site tothe search engines. When you’re looking for a name, you can just toss in tenoptions and the site will tell you which (if any) are available. All in, buying aname from one of these service won’t cost you more than about $20 a year.

If you can’t find a name you like and that hasn’t already been grabbedthough, you can take a look at sites like moderndomains.com andbestnames.net. These are companies that buy domain names and sell themfor a profit. There’s a good chance you’ll find some good names here butthey can cost you anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with apenny, think about the advantage that a good name can bring and askyourself if you can’t get the extra traffic a cheaper way. Often, you can. Andremember, twelve years ago no one knew what a Yahoo, ebay or Googlewas!