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If you register your own domain, make sure you get a good one. For a new business, or any site you're setting up as a venture in itself, the name will be critical. The most important rule is to keep it simple. Ideally your domain name should be short and easy to spell out verbally. But don't try to shorten a long company name by abbreviating words and/or adding hyphens; users will be more likely to type the full name correctly than to guess your abbreviations.

Not only do you need to think of a good domain name, you need to make sure you can get it. There are so many websites out there that your initial choice may well have been taken already. In the main article we discuss how to use whois to check whether anyone currently owns a domain.

You should try to book your name under the most appropriate top-level domain (TLD). For example, a British company would normally be .co.uk, a non-profit organisation .org.uk, and an educational institution .ac.uk. Many people prefer to use .com, though, which is intended for US and international companies but is widely seen as a default generic domain; if someone's going to guess your web address, they'll probably try .com first.

The catch is that the name you want is even more likely to have been taken already under .com. There are various alternative and new TLDs that you might also consider. The .net TLD is open to any use, though typically associated with Internet-related organisations; .biz is now used by some businesses as an alternative to .com; .eu is reserved for users within Europe, but for some reason isn't especially popular. The tiny Polynesian nation of Tuvalu makes good money renting .tv to a company that sells domain names to the television industry.

Whichever TLD you choose, check who's registered the same name under others, and think about whether it's worth taking any unregistered TLDs yourself to avoid confusion. At least one British firm ended up changing not only its web address but its company name after discovering a hardcore pornography website was using the same initials followed by '.com' rather than '.co.uk'. Once a few friends, family or customers have hit the wrong address, you'll wish you'd thought twice. On the other hand, don't be suckered into buying up every similar domain under the sun; it's only the really obvious ones you need to consider.