What is the First Step With Registering a Domain Name?

I received this email from a user of one of my websites recently, this question is typical from a person wanting to make their first website. The reply below is not conclusive, more information can be found on my blog.

Question: I would like to know what is the first step with registering a domain name and then web hosting,do I type up the contents I want in a word document before I register for a domain name and web hosting. I also want to know how to link my web page to other sites and how to set up the pay pal and other options, thank you.

Reply: The first step is to work out what you want from your website, and register a domain name that is relevant to your website content. Look at keywords that are associated with your site. Take notice of the websites that you visit, most will have the domain name made up from keywords from the site.

Most business that register domain names, also sell web hosting and vica versa, as this is your first site I would recommend getting your domain name and hosting at the same place. GoDaddy is my favorite for domain name registrations, a dot com domain name should be available for about $10 us. GoDaddy provide hosting as well as many tools needed to run your site.

Word documents are not the best way to go for creating a web page, I would suggest that you use a free HTML editor like CoffeeCup to format and create your page. A good editor will let you look at you page in a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get ) or code format. Coffee cup also has a built in FTP (file transfer protocol) for uploading your files from your PC to your web site

Listing your page on the major search engines like, Google, Yahoo and Bing is the best tip for getting inbound links to your page, reciprocal linking to 1000 sites is not always the best idea, I have a site with 6 inbound links ranking 1 on page 1 of Google.

Geoff Merritt
http://www.makingwebsitesblog.com/

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