Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

Attract Customers and Make Yourself Famous

How to Register A Domain Name for Your Website

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If you are doing business, online or offline, you need a website. When potential clients go looking for you (or for someone who does what you do) they look online. If you are not there, they won’t find you. And I am shocked at the number of times I meet someone or hear about a new business and find no trace of them (or perhaps only a Facebook page) online.

If you are in business, you need a website of some kind as your online presence. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, but it needs to be there.

Before you set up a website, you need to register a domain name. The domain name, or URL, is the address of your website that people enter to reach your site. For example, the URL of my primary site is IdeaLady.com.

Registering domain names is easy and inexpensive. There are hundreds (thousands?) of places to buy them. [Read more…]

Choosing a Great Domain Name

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urlHave you been putting off setting up a web site because you think all of the good dot-coms have been taken? Wrong! There are many great domain names available. Here is how to find the one that is right for your business.

Actually, you should register more than one domain name. That does not mean that you must have multiple web sites. You can have all of the domain names point at your main site, or you may have different URLs point to different sections of your web site. It is easy to do with domain forwarding (available though any of the domain registrars). [Read more…]

Do You Own Your Name?

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com.jpgI got a political brochure in the mail today, and it was a nasty piece of work. Perhaps the worst part is that the URL for their attack web site is the candidate’s name, as in “JohnSmith.com.”

Many times, people looking for information will simply enter the name of a person or company followed by “.com.” Voters wanting to learn about the candidate may enter his name and end up on a site set up by his political enemies. People who do not read the attack brochure carefully may even think that the “JohnSmith.com”  site is the candidate’s official site.

Fortunately for this politician, when you do a Google search on his name, his real campaign site comes up first and the attack site was not in the top results. However,  you can not be certain that this will happen if you are ever the victim of this kind of identity theft.

You may think that you do not need to own <yourname>.com. You do business under a company name, and you do not ever plan to run for office, so why do you need to register your name as a domain name? [Read more…]