Your website name, or domain name, is a critical part of creating your website and will have a large influence on subsequent position in search engine rankings. It’s possible that your desired name has already been registered so you may need to get creative.
First check if the domain you’re looking for is available using a company such as 123-reg. If it is, great! If not you may need to get creative.
Things to try:
- consider different endings. The most common endings for UK websites are .com or .co.uk, but there are hundreds of other alternatives.
- Play with hyphens. if myperfectwebsite.co.uk is unavailable, why not try my-perfect-website.co.uk?
- Add your location to the name or your line of business
- If all else fails, grab a friend and a couple of drinks and throw some ideas around.
If you find more than one that name that is available, it’s worth buying them to protect your brand and prevent someone else registering a similar website name. Likely mis-spellings of your website name may also be worth buying too.
One final thing to consider is that the domain name will also form the basis of email addresses for you and your colleagues so don’t make it too long or it won’t fit on your business cards.
Now that you have your domain name, you’ll need to find some Web Hosting