To get a website name, the first thing to do is come up with a name for your website.
Try and think of a word or words that describe your business, blog or other website idea.
Let’s pretend we have a business selling widgets and we are located in the UK – suitable names for our website could be widget.com, widget.co.uk, ukwidgets.com widgets.co.uk etc
So now we have some ideas for our website, we can see if the website name is available. By the way, a website name is also called a domain name.
We don’t necessarily need to select a name that describes our business. We could alternatively think of a unique, but memorable name such as Yahoo or Amazon. Remember, if you decide to opt for finding a domain name using this approach, shorter is better and avoid using hyphens or numbers in the name.
First of all we will type our first idea – “widget” into the search box at the top of the webpage and hit the search button.
Search box
As you can see from the image below, widgets.com is not available. However, there is an option to to go to WHOIS, which will give us an idea of who owns the website and we can then approach that person or company and make them an offer for the name.
For the purpose of this exercise, we are not going to proceed with finding out who owns the site, we are going to find a name that is available for us to buy right now.
As you can see from the image below, the second and third ringed items suggest names that are available such as “biblewidgets.com” and “playerwidgets.com”. There are also some more expensive premium names in the third ring showing “widgetsets.com” and “widgetsource.com”
These names don’t really describe are business.
For the purpose of this exercise, we are a widget shop located in the UK, so we could try a name such as widgetshopuk.com.
We type “widgetshopuk” into the search box at the top of the page and hit return.
The seach box looks like the image below.
As you can see from the image below, widgetshopuk.com is available, so we will go ahead and place the order by hitting the “Continue to Registration” button.
Tip
You may want to consider buying some of the other domains with different extensions, so that they are taken off the market.
In our case we would want to buy “widgetshopuk.co.uk”, “widgetshopuk.net” and “widgetshopuk.org”.
This will stop our competitors from taking a similar domain name and stealing our brand.
We are then presented with form similar to the one below. It is then a simple matter of following the instructions and completing the order.
We are then the proud owner of a new website name or domain name, as it is known.
Once we have our new domain name, we will need a hosting company to load our files onto for our website, so we can add one of the options from Godaddy to add some hosting, or we can shop around and find another option.
Domain Name Guide