I have long pon­dered set­ting up a “Home on the Web”. Obvi­ously, if you are read­ing this, I must have actu­ally got around to it, but what does it take to make it happen?

Man, there is so much choice out there… it would con­fuse a saint! It used to be that two scoops of DNS, a cup of apache, and a sprin­kling of HTML was all that was required to have a pres­ence on the Inter­Web. Despite know­ing all these tech­nolo­gies way back when, I was far from being a cre­ative type that could meld them together to form any­thing which looked pro­fes­sional. Now we are spoiled for choice, so much so that we are liable to suf­fer from the para­dox of choice…

So what does it take to be pro­fes­sional on the web these days:

1. It all starts with a domain name, your address on the web. More on this topic anon.
2. Some­where to live! Do you host your pres­ence your­self, or pay up for some­body else to do it?
3. A frame­work. While there have been tem­plate web sites pre­vi­ously, noth­ing matches some of the cur­rent “Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems” for power, func­tions, or flexibility.
4. A blog. Doh!
5. A gallery of your happy snaps.
6. A “Poke me, Ping me, Prod me, Link me” herd of social net­work­ing con­nec­tions, ’cause I am avail­able 24x7x365 and want to be Super­Poked! Honestly!
7. Some Google adver­tis­ing, to bring the masses.
8. Some Google AdSense money, to pay for 1–7.

Finally, it would be really, really, really nice if all of that was backed up by email which was always on, avail­able on the desk­top, the browser, and on your mobile device.

So, I will (attempt to) doc­u­ment my expe­ri­ence imple­ment­ing all of this. No prob­lem

Firstly, domain names… I would imag­ine that most peo­ple know the in’s and out’s of domain names, but in case you were wondering:

“A name that iden­ti­fies a com­puter or com­put­ers on the Inter­net” — Wikipedia

In a pre­vi­ous life, I worked at a com­pany which was tran­si­tion­ing from devel­op­ing Y2K soft­ware to e-commerce, and the mar­ket­ing man­ager (rather painful per­son) approaches one of my col­leagues (a clever guy) with the fol­low­ing question:

“Can you tell me if the domain name e.com is available?”

Guy pauses, does a quick Inter­net search and replies in the neg­a­tive. Next question:

“What about ecommerce.com?”

Guy returns to Inter­net and again replies in the neg­a­tive. So this goes on for a few min­utes, much to our eaves­drop­ping amuse­ment. Even­tu­ally all good things come to an end, and the mar­ket­ing man­ager, becom­ing impa­tient, poses the fol­low­ing beauty:

MM: “Ok then, can you send me a list of all the un-registered e-commerce related domain names?”

GUY: “Huh!?! That would be like ask­ing me for a list of every­thing that is not green!”

MM:  “Are you going to do or should I speak with your manager???”

And the funny thing is, that nowa­days nearly every sen­si­ble domain name in the Eng­lish lan­guage has been reg­is­tered, either by a legit­i­mate busi­ness, or more likely, a “domain squat­ter” who prof­its from adver­tis­ing and pos­si­bly sell­ing the domain at a later date.

A good domain name is very impor­tant for your busi­ness / pres­ence on the Inter­net, but what con­sti­tutes a good domain name?

1. Short and con­cise. Nobody wants to be typ­ing for ages, so keep it short so your domain name is…
2. Hard to mis­spell. Type in nearly any well-known web­site address incor­rectly, and I am sure that you will hit a domain squatter.
3. Mem­o­rable. This is a hard one these days, but web sites like flickr, digg, and even del.icio.us have man­aged it.
4. Related to what you do. In Ire­land, for the .ie domain, this was never an issue in that you had to pro­duce a legal doc­u­ment to prove that you were trad­ing as “XYZ” in order to reg­is­ter “XYZ.ie”. Even with the advent of per­sonal names as domain names, they require a pass­port or dri­vers license to prove who you are.  Thank­fully most of the other top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.) are not as rigid.

So are there any resources out there to help me pick a good name? Why, yes there is! These are some inter­est­ing ones from Smash­ing Mag­a­zine:

• http://www.makewords.com/ — Domain name generator
• http://www.dyyo.com/ — Locate domain names of a cer­tain length
• http://xona.com/domainhacks/- Assem­bles “weird” domain names such as del.icio.us

In the end, I reg­is­tered my name… for two main reasons:

1. Unless you have a reg­is­tered busi­ness name, it is very hard to reg­is­ter a “.ie” domain for any­thing other than your name
2. I hope to make my way as a pho­tog­ra­pher, which is a very per­sonal pro­fes­sion… your name is your business

Watch out for the next episode… Host­ing, Google Apps, DNS set­tings, and WordPress.