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Easy Steps to a Great Site

Tips, tricks, and tools that will help you spruce up a dowdy home page--or build a brand-new one.

Dennis O'Reilly

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The Domain Name Game

Getting a URL is a simple matter of visiting a registering-service site, entering your first choice in the site's domain-name search box, seeing if the name is available, and plunking down your $35 (or less) for the first year of use. Here are a few things to think about.

Keep your URL short and easy to remember. Try to choose one that tells people a little bit about the site. We chose "furrycompanions.com" for our fictional site, but we could've used "notarealpetsite.com" or "finefurryfriends.com".

Stay away from strange suffixes. Unless you're running a school (.edu), a nonprofit organization (.org), or a government agency (.gov), stick with .com.

Register some variations. If you think your domain name is going to become a valuable asset or if your business is entirely Web-based, you may want to register the ".net" and ".org" versions of the name as well. This will stymie future domain-name interlopers.

Check with your Web host. Many Web hosting services include domain name registration in some of their service packages. Some offer customers subdomains of their own domain--for example, "furrycompanions.hostname.com". See "A Host of Hosts" for more on hosting services.

The granddaddy of registrars is Network Solutions, but these days you have many choices for registering a new domain. Check out RegSelect for advice and pricing information on accredited registrars. The standard charge is $35 per year; Web-hosting service Verio, however, currently offers to register .com, .net, and .org domain names for only $19 per year. Visit Verio to check out the offer.

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