What Is A Domain
Name?
What are
the Top Level Domains?
What are the two most common types of Internet addresses?
Generic vs. Personalized
Why Should I Own One?
What
Is A Domain Name?
A domain name is your own cyber-estate. This estate,
just like its physical counterpart, has its value
depending on its address (name) and its content. You
can charge your visitors or give them a free tour,
or run a side business as part of the estate.
Our domain name is AboutDomains .com. This is the
Internet equivalent of a physical business address,
acting as a storefront for our products and services
and an address where customers can contact us with
specific questions.
Every domain name contains two or more components
separated by periods, called "dots". The
last part of our address, "com", is called
the "top level domain". To the left of the
dot in our name, AboutDomains, is what is called the
"second-level domain". It is also possible
to have sub-domains such as "Marketing.AboutDomains.com".
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What are the Top Level
Domain Designation?
| .com |
For
commercial entities, which anyone, anywhere in
the world, can register. |
| .net
|
Originally
designated for organizations directly involved
in Internet operations. It is increasingly being
used by businesses when the desired name under
"com" is already registered by another
organization. Today anyone can register a name
in the Net domain. |
| .org |
For
miscellaneous organizations, including non-profits. |
| .biz |
For business organizations. |
| .info |
For
anyone, anywhere in the world, can register. |
| .edu |
For
four-year accredited institutions of higher learning. |
| .gov
|
For
US Federal Government entities |
| .mil |
For
US military |
Country
Codes |
For
individual countries based on the International
Standards Organization. For example, ca for Canada,
and jp for Japan. |
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Generic
vs. Personalized
Your Internet address (domain name) can either be
generic or personalized.
Generic
This type of address is typically associated with
a free service such as hotmail.com or Yahoo.com, your
alma mater, or your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
such as AOL.com
A generic address would be of the following form:
Email: YourName@Generic.com
Website: www.Generic.com/~YourName/
When personalized, it will have the form:
Email: YourName@YourAddress.com
Website: www.YourAddress.com
as long as "YourAddress.com" is still available.
Click here to check
if a domain name is still available. If available,
you should register or reserve it immediately.
What are the two most common types of Internet addresses?
(1) Domain Name
(2) Email Address
Almost all email addresses look like "username@Domain_Name.
Besides the above two types of emails (generic and
customized) you can choose a vanity email.
With vanity email, you get to select both the username
and a Domain_Name from a list provided by specialty
vendors like VanityMail.
One serious drawback of these names is that you don't
own the address and thus you cannot use the domain
name as your company's storefront.
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Why
You Should Own One
A. Investment
Competitive Advantage. If you own your company,
you should carefully select your domain name, as it
represents both your storefront and your online address.
It should be a name that your customers can remember
and use to identify your brand.
I don't need to tell you the importance of commerce
on the Internet. In this environment, you need to
enhance and protect the value of your company's name.
Your competition might be cannibalizing your business
because its domain name acts as a magnet to surfers
while you're waiting for them.
You are probably like the vast majority of people
who constantly need to give out their business telephone
number, fax number, and Internet addresses (work,
educational, or personal). Unfortunately, there is
nothing in common between them. Thus, you might consider
making your telephone number as your email address
(e.g., 800-FLOWERS). You can do that by acquiring
or trading part of these business addresses to make
sure that your business is more visible and more memorable
in the minds of your customers.
Gold Rush Is On. Investing in domain-names
has been dubbed the gold rush of the '90's. You surely
don't want to miss it!
$ and Fun! Why not make money while having
fun? You can double your fun and become your friends'
envy by having a matching vanity license plate number
with a domain-name. And the fun goes on and on and
...
B. Protection Against Profit Dilution
Although not all intellectual property violations
are a result of malice, a number of organizations
have discovered that domain-name violations can be
a lucrative business. Without your knowledge others
are intentionally or otherwise diluting the value
of your domain-name as well as siphoning profit and
traffic away from your business.
For instance, if your primary domain-name is tennisarchive.com,
someone can register a domain-name that is very similar
to yours, say tenisarchive.com and use the site to
sell sports-related or other products. So now visitors
intending to go to your site, who unconsciously type
in tenisarchive.com (i.e., with only one "n")
would end up somewhere else. Thus, you would lose
precious sales as well as have the intrinsic value
of your domain-name diluted.
The most common violations are misspelled words and
adding a "www" prefix to your domain-name.
So they would register "wwwtennisarchive.com",
i.e., a domain with no "dot" separating
the "www" and your domain-name. Other serious
games include registering permutations of your name.
In the case of "CheckDomain.com", for instance,
someone registered "DomainCheck.com" and
started running it as an adult site.
Since these games and tactics siphon profits that
otherwise belong to you, we recommend that you also
register names "similar" to your primary
domain. You should also consider registering your
domain-name in other countries.
Basics