A domain name that you can remember means that customers are likely to come back more often and spread the word about your site to others. Things you want to consider:

  • Easy to spell names
  • Shorter the better
  • .com or .co.uk
  • Name of your company
  • Name of your service/product

Domain names are unquie identifiers made up of symbols seperated by dots. These characters between the dots are refered to as labels. When creating your domain name there are a number of rules to be aware of:

  • No more than 127 labels
  • No label can exceed 63 characters
  • Labels are case insensitive
  • Labels can be made up of letters, numbers or hyghens (-) but can not start with a hyphen

Domain Jargon

TLD's - Top Level domains. Refers to .com .org etc

DNS - Domain Name System. Basically this tells your web browser where to find a web site on the internet. When you register a name is is stored on the Internets 'root servers' which are administrated by the central interne authorities. this record provides the IP addresses of two or more DNS servers which are responsible for your domain. These look like blacksnow.co.uk 251.256.235.215

MX Record - Mail Exchange Record. These are show like this:

blacksnow.co.uk MX 10 mailhost1.company.com.
blacksnow.co.uk MX 10 mailhost2.company.com.
blacksnow.co.uk MX 20 mailhost3.company.com.

The above MX records differ to allow load sharing and priority between multiple mail servers for a domain. The lower number is the higher priority. Two MX records with the same number or priority will share the workload equally. The server with the higher number will only be contacted only if the higher priority servers are unavailable. This is a backup if the primary systems are unreachable.

To look at your mx records you can use a tool called 'NSLOOKUP'. This is avaliable from the command line simply type in
NSLOOKUP [return]
set type=mx [return]
yourdomainname.com [return]

Email

Within the package you purchase with your domain name will be email facilities. These will include email addresses at your domain name and email forwarding. These deal with incoming mail (through POP3) and you can have what ever email address you want e.g. sales@yourdomain.com.

If you want to send email (using SMTP) this provides a different problem as virtual all domain name providers don't give you a SMTP server. This means usually replying to your emails from sales@yourisp.com. Some ISP's will allow you to send outgoing mail which isn't a domain on their server e.g. our ISP - Plus.Net

Getting your website known

Search Engines

Submitting your URL to search engines is the quickest and most common way to get your site known. Blacksnow will discuss which keys words and description should be used to promote your site. Don't be fooled into opting for a company offering to submit your site to 300+ Search engines. There are only a handful of search engines which get 90% of the hits. It takes time to do this so as part of any package we will then submit your site MANUALLY to the UK's top 10 search engines. This will also be done every six months to make sure your site is still registered.

How they work
Most search engines use 'spiders', 'robots', 'web crawlers' etc that trawl the Internet, indexing sites into a huge directory, which when queried by a user will return the best match. Search engines index web sites by using the metatags. These are incorporated into the source code of your website. For example the keywords used by blacksnow look like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="blacksnow, web design,web site design,web design devon,database sites, updateable websites, corporate web sites, business web sites,flash web pages">

Bookmarks

You can put a reminder on your page to bookmark your site if they like it. It increases the chances that your visitors will return.

Advertising

Your Web site address should be on every piece of company media from letterheads to coffee cups, invoices to fax cover sheets, press advertising to telephone book inserts - a mention on any piece of media material will increase the amount of exposure your site gets.

We've even seen url's on car number plates and on the side of vehicles. Sat behind that in a traffic jam gets your attention and may bring that buying customer to your site.

Keeping your site current

This is an important principle in keeping your ste popular. If it isn't updated regularly visitors will not bother to return. New information on products/events will make sure your site doesn't wane in popularity.

Link Exchanges

Exchange links can be an effective way to exposing your site to people already inetrested in your business area. If you belong to various trade associations that feature member sites ask if you can have a link.