Horizon Web Development

Another key step to setting up your own website is the domain name. The domain name is not only how people find your site but also how they identify it, e.g. Amazon.com, and is another vital step in promoting your site so you must ensure it's the right one.

The most obvious domain name to go for would be the name of your company, but there are at least a couple of potential problems with this. Firstly, as with Horizon Web Development your company, or even your own name for a personal site, could be a little too long and hard to remember. Another problem is that the name may have already been taken by someone else.

Both problems have similar solutions, you should think about shortening the name, perhaps using an abbreviation or even a company slogan, whatever it is it has to be short and catchy, something that people will remember.

Whatever name you choose it should be related to your business, if possible try and put your product name in your domain name as having keywords in your domain name can help with your search engine rankings.

Another consideration would be how to break up the name, for instance Mike's DVDs could be mikesdvds.com or mikes-dvds.com. This is another problem that was encountered with Horizon Web Development, where there were two real possibilities, horizon-web.co.uk and horizonweb.co.uk. After much research and debate it was discovered that although Search Engines prefer hyphens to break up the words, and so you are likely to get a better ranking, most people tend to take it as one long word when remembered back from flyers and business cards. So we decided to go with horizonweb.co.uk. Again it comes down to how easy is it to remember, are people likely to remember your site name as Mike's hyphen DVDs, or Mike's DVDs?

The final consideration is what is known and the top level domain which is few letters that come after your domain name, there are plenty to choose from such as .com, .biz, .net, .org and .co.uk to name but a few. I'd suggest that if you can get the name you want as a .com to do so but as they tend to mostly go to US companies it is unlikely that it will be available. If not you should perhaps go for a .net or .org and failing that your country specific top level domain, such as .co.uk. I would also suggest that you go for as many of the domain names as possible, just to ensure that a mistyped name doesn't take a potential client to a competitor, which is perfectly possible with some domains, such as dvds.com and dvds.co.uk.

At the very least you should try to get your country specific domain as well as any of the main ones such as .net, .com and .org, which if you're in the UK is .co.uk.