The information below is designed for people
who know little about domain names. If you are already familiar with
domain names then all you will want to know is that pinkdylan are members of
Nominet, and we hold our own bulk register account.
You need a domain name for your "Internet identity" - to use as your website address
(www.pinkdylan.co.uk) and for your email address (info@pinkdylan.co.uk).
In our case "pinkdylan.co.uk" is our domain name.
Once registered the names are yours for the registration period (usually
2 years) and you have the right to renew them. As long as they are renewed
then you can retain the same web address and email addresses for life - they
are also portable, you are not stuck with one hosting company.
But what name do I go
for: .co.uk? .com??
There are many different types of domain names available,
the ones that most UK based organisations will consider fall into two
categories - "UK" names, and "American" names. Just like the UK never prints
the country name on its postage stamps, because we were the first to invent
them - the Americans don't add a country identifier onto their domain names.
For this reason they can also be considered "International", and there is no
reason why UK companies cannot use them. Larger companies and companies with
offices in several countries will routinely use "dot com's".
The most commonly used names in the UK are as follows:
All domain names are made up from letters a-z, numbers 0-9,
and the "-" (minus sign), followed by an extension (such as ".com"). There
can be no spaces or other characters.
Names are issued on a "first come, first served", basis -
and it is now often difficult to find one that is nice and short and relates
to your business name or the nature of your business.
In an ideal world (i.e. if available) most businesses would
register BOTH .co.uk and .com versions of a domain name, and also (if the
name is two or more words added together), both the hyphenated and
non-hyphenated versions. Multiple domain names can all point to one website,
and all work for your email. The advantage of multiple names as described
above is twofold - firstly, you are preventing someone else using a very
similar name, causing confusion and secondly you are relying on peoples
memory less. Also, hyphenated versions of multi-word names are easier to
read on paper, but the non-hyphenated versions are easier to speak out
verbally.
pinkdylan can register
names for you - we are members of Nominet - who issue ALL "UK" names, and we
hold a bulk register account for registering the "American" names.
