So you want a webpage, or maybe you want to be like me and have six plus some blogs [see blogroll]. Either way, you have to start with your web name! This covers basics like getting a domain name [your URL], what the heck you do to make it work … and what you do if [when] you want to change it.
1. Pick a name[s]! Decide!
I know that picking a name is the hardest part, but luckily we live in a plentiful linguistic world — so you do that part and come back. Before you get soooooo excited please check that it’s not already registered to a real person or robot by typing it into your browser of choice or use a domain search tool.
2. Buy & Register it: Goooo creepy bueruacracy!
Get yourself* to godaddy.com or dotster.com [two larger domain registrant organizations] and search to see if your domain name was bought in the 2 days since you decided what to use. Go ahead and make an account and buy the name**. When it gets to checkout you can choose crazy hosting packages for your site, which are usually a little OOC and you can always buy them later, and you can also choose whether to pay more to make your registration private. If you don’t use privacy, people who creepily search WhoIs databases can see the last name, city and zip code of who each non-private URL is registered to. Sometimes that won’t bother you and sometimes you are freaked out by that and want to pay for the privacy – your call.
*my recommendation #1 – register it yourself. Don’t get your buddy who is helping you with your site to do it, because if tragedy befalls your buddy or your friendship, well then whoops – you can’t access your internet name when you need to update your site / it expires and a german porn site buys it.
**recommendation #2 – buy your government name, too: the one you pay taxes under, and for god measure the one you f*ck under/travel under. If you have the extra $10 each, do it! Otherwise someone else will.
3. Be like a Domme and Direct It
Since you have control over your Domain name, you can log into the account you bought it under and either:
– Direct the “namservers” of the domain name to point to server space you bought or your friend is giving you [the server space will have this information]
OR
– Direct the domain name to a free or other servive you are using, such as blogger, wordpress, freewebs, etc. You have two options
- Forwarding – someone types in yourdomain.com and wordpress.yourwordpressname.com comes up in the address bar of the browser
- Masking – someone types in yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com remains in the address bar. This is good if you have some janky-looking free service name [www.cheapofreebizsite.com/damienluxe] and want to appear more professional than that. Bad because people will not ever be able to get directly to a page on your site because the address bar is masked with just your domain name.
4. Mom…I changed my name/I have six names
That’s ok. The internet will never judge, it’s just a series of 1’s and 0’s electromagnetically linked. Some of us like naming, it’s cool. You just need to go through steps one and two above and then…
a. Move your existing site/blog to your new URL [that’s a whole other post].
b. Keep your “old name”/URL site active, but just have one index.html page instead of all your content
c. Automatically redirect visitors from the “old name” site to your “new name site” by placing the following HTML in the index page of your “old” site in between the <head></head> tags of your web pages or blog:
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
CONTENT="1; URL=autoforward_target.html">
So 1 is the amount of wait time before the viewer is forwarded and the ...html is the page the browser takes the viewer to.