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#1 Stake Your Claim:
Choosing a Web
Address
Choosing the
right address for your website is very similar to choosing a
site for your farm -- it needs to be flexible for any future
changes you may make, you want to know if there were any
harmful toxins used there in the past, and you'll be spending
a lot of time there, so you better like looking at it!
First, let's talk terms: URL is the entire address of the website,
for example this site's URL is:
http://www.ourheritagefarm.com. The "domain
name" is the part of your address that
identifies you uniquely - in our case "ourheritagefarm.com".
Many free website services
will offer you a URL with a subdomain, such as
www.alpacafarm.earthlink.com or similarly, some
people list their Alpaca Nation site as  their primary web site
address:
www.alpacanation.com/alpacafarm.asp . From a business
standpoint, these practices do not promote the fact that you
are serious about raising alpacas so you may want to
reconsider using either one of these. From a technical
standpoint, if you ever want to switch to a different web
service provider you will have to change your address and tell
all your visitors about a new address. Needless to say, all
past bookmarks to your site will be broken. Think long term
and spend a few dollars to get a solid domain name that
represents your farm and lets people know you are serious
about your business.
So how do you go
about getting your own domain? It's really a simple and
inexpensive process. Only one person on the Internet may
own each domain name, so if you have a common farm name you
will need to be creative. For example, when we were
investigating using HeritageFarm as our domain name, we found
that heritagefarm.com and heritagefarm.net and several other
extensions where already taken. The domain registrar
we use was helpful in suggesting several alternatives. We chose
OurHeritageFarm because in conveys that the farm is part of our heritage, which
it is. You will also want the domain name to be very flexible
to accommodate any new areas your business may explore. For
example, if you currently own only suri alpacas and you call
your site heritagefarmsuris.com, what happens in five
years if you decide to breed and sell huacayas as
well? Perhaps a better choice would be
heritagefarmalpacas.com. You get the point.
It is
important to include strong keywords in your domain name
because search engines look at domain names, among many other
factors, in returning results for search queries. In our
example, it may have been more effective to use the domain
"heritagealpacafarm.com" because when someone queries a search
engine for "alpaca farm", ours would place high in the
returned list.
There are several sites
that allow you to search for available domain names. To start,
try:
http://www.instantdomainsearch.com/
http://www.godaddy.com
http://www.uplinkearth.com
A domain name registration for one year should cost about
$10, which you can complete from any of the above sites.
O.K. you might be
thinking why should I go to the bother of registering a domain
name if I don't even have a personal farm website yet? One reason is to plan
for the future and secure the name you want before it is
taken. Another
reason is that there is a cool technique called "Domain
Forwarding" which allows you to connect to any other URL when
your personal web address is entered into a browser. This means that
if you currently have only an Alpaca Nation site (or any other
public site), you can map your personal web address to your
URL on that site or.
This gives you the flexibility of re-mapping whenever
your build your own site and your customers and web viewers
won't have to learn a new URL.
Now that you have
chosen your strong, flexible domain name you need to think
about hosting - that is, how will your information be
delivered to a visitor when they type your URL in their
address bar? I will cover this aspect of farm web development
in the next installment of "Farming the
Web".
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