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Even for a personal site, you'll want friends and family to be able to remember your web address easily and type it in without having to double-check where to put a bunch of weird punctuation. And these days a lot of websites exist somewhere between the private and personal arenas: you may just be blogging about your life or a specialist pursuit, but you'd be quite happy to attract visits from the general public, especially since it's now quite easy to make small amounts of money from a busy website using advertising services such as Google AdSense (www.google.com/adsense) and Amazon Associates (www.affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk).

Your own domain

Creating your own web address means registering a domain name. The 'top-level' domain is the '.com', 'co.uk', '.org' or whatever that comes at the very end of a web address. Top-level domains (TLDs) are administered by various national and international organisations. Within these, you can register your own second-level domain, the part of the address that comes immediately before this. For example, Google owns the domain name 'google' in most of the top-level domains, so typing 'www.google.com', 'www.google.co.uk', 'www.google.jp' (for Japan) and so on will always take you to a Google home page.

Registering (or 'booking') a domain name simply means creating a record with the relevant administration body that identifies you as the current owner of that

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name. The Internet registry for addresses in the .uktop-level domain, for example, is Nominet (www.nominet.org.uk). You do this through a 'registrar', which may be an Internet service provider (ISP), a web hosting company or a company that specialises in domain names. Many registrars are members of the relevant body and can register domains directly, while others go through intermediaries.

You pay the registrar a small fee and they register the name for you. The fee really is small, typically under £5 per year for .co.uk and under £10 for .com, for example. You'll need to make sure you renew the registration every year or two years, or someone else could grab your domain name. The registrar should alert you when it's time to renew.

Details of all domain registrations are held by registrars in the 'whois' format. Various online tools are available to search this information for you. For example, go to www.who.is and type a domain name into the search box. You could try a name you're thinking of registering to see if it's already taken, or just enter a domain you know exists, such as 'amazon', to see how it works.

You're shown a full list of all top-level domains under which that name is already taken, together with details of the registrants, plus a list of TLDs within which the name is still available, and even suggestions for similar names that you might like to register. Although such search engines often promote a particular registrar, you can go and register any available name with any registrar who deals in the relevant TLD.

Registering your domain

When you register your own domain, it's important to understand (and check) that the domain name belongs to you, not the registrar. The important field in the domain registration is 'Registrant'. This may not be included in the initial whois summary; scroll down or click for more info to find it. The registrant of your domain should be listed as you, not the company who registers it for you; they should be listed as 'Registrar'. The 'administrative contact' should also refer to yourself, showing a valid email address that you own. (Other details will refer to the registrar, which is fine.)