Domain Names – The Basics You Need to Know

Choosing the right domain name for your new website is essential. Your domain name becomes part of your business’s identity and how people see & remember your site.

Choose the wrong one and at the worst you could actually lose a lot of business then have all the hassle of changing over to a better one later. But choose the right one and you’ll be able to enjoy the long term branding benefits and all the natural (free) search engine traffic that a long established domain tends to bring.

What Exactly is the Domain Name?

The domain name of a site is simply the address that someone types into their web browser to visit your site. It identifies your particular web pages and can include letters, numbers and hyphens – capitalisation of letters has no effect on a domain name. For example, www.mysite.com and www.MySite.com would both direct to exactly the same site and cannot be registered as 2 different domains as they’re exactly the same.

Most of the time (depending on the web host) the domain name can be typed in with or without the ‘www.’.

Anyone can register .com domain name – you don’t need any business registrations or anything. If you want to register a .com.au domain though you’ll need to have an ABN and a valid reason for wanting to register that domain.

It isn’t essential with a .com.au to also have a registered business name the same as the domain name, but the risk is if you don’t someone else can register that business name then legally request that you relinquish your domain name to them.