website / email question

[Higgledyhouse]

Right here goes............. I'm a complete novice so please excuse how basic my questions are!!! I hope someone can help!

I want to set up a company wedsite and e-mail account.

I know that I need to therefore buy the domain name which is fairly cheap. However what is the difference between buying comapany.co.uk or company.com?

Also can you buy the domain name seperately from deciding on who will host and design website?

If somebody could give me a breif step by step guide on how to do this that would be great!!!

Thanks in advance!

you can set up a website easily using Mrsite.com

The cost of the site (£20 ish a year) includes the domain name .com .co.uk .org or lots of other things

will watch with interest........

The domain name can be bought seperately. These are the prices at one place I use. To me there is no difference between com and uk. Some prefer the domain name to indicate where the company is based, but it's not vital.

There is a certain amount of setting up to point your domain name to your web site once you have one. A short online form of sorts that you only have to do the once unless you change hosting companies. It's not that difficult and there are plenty of instructions.

If you get the domain name with your hosting package you skip that step, but are at the mercy of the hosting company if you want to change something later so I much prefer to keep the two separate.

As for designing it that's a bit trickier. I pay for just the hosting package from Arvixe and made the website myself. Some places like the Mrsite.com that mumofmonsters mentions have a 'make your site from a menu' system. Or you can pay a real person to do the design.

If you don't want to have to spend a lot of time learning new skills you're probably better off going with mrsite or something like it for the lot.

Consider the name you choose for your website carefully, it does not need to be the name of the company... it could be more product/service specific. Consider what users would be searching for... can you include popular search word/phrase in the website name?

Are you trading locally or global? If only in the UK, then a .co.uk is fine. If more global then .COM may be better... though I'm not sure there is really much of a difference. You could get both and redirect one of them so that if someone say typed in the .co.uk one, it brings up the .com

For many years I have had my domain and webhost separate. Now that I have used by webhost for many years, I have moved my domain to them... as it made it a little easier with regard to a recent server move.

As you are starting out, I would suggest looking more at who will be hosting your website, who will be creating your website. Once you have settled on where the website will be hosted, then decide if you want to use them to register the domain name (look carefully at terms of moving domain name, transfer - as you don't want to be tied to paying a fee if you decide to move later).

Some companies I have found good:

www.freeparking.co.uk - Domain registration. Has a facility to search for domains by entering up to 3 words.
www.34sp.com - I currently host my website with this UK based company, have been using them for over 5 years now... good e-mail/web-based support.

Hmmm, freeparking.co.uk are actually a US host which makes them a bad choice for hosting a UK domain. And AFAIK they do not offer a proper DNS service (I'm not going to get technical here).

Proper UK domian hosts (and cheaper) include 123-reg and UK2.net. The biggest (US) domain host is GoDaddy and they are OK too.

The main difference between .com and .co.uk is often availability. Basically if you can't get one then you take the other. I'd recommend taking both if you can, it means people don't have to remember which one you've got and avoids confusion caused by someone else taking the other.

Get the domain name first and the website separately. It makes it easier to move if you need to. I got my domain name through virtualnames.co.uk. I'm happy with them, but I'm not that demanding.

For .com .net or .info (or .org) I'd use a US firm (I use GoDaddy.com Name.com and MyDomain.com depending on whether one has a low cost deal on at the time ... not important for a business user, but Name.com offers free 'whois privacy') as $9-$11 is lower than many of the UK firms charge (eg 8.99 +VAT) Transfer from one firm to another is a cheap way to renew, as they tend to charge less for transfers than renewals. Although a transfer is charged, they add a year to the expiry date too.

For .uk then I'd probably use 123-reg.co.uk (though I tend to avoid .uk domains - if changes are needed there are fees to pay, whereas no fees apply for changes with the US firms I've used).

Another firm to consider (for .co.uk) is Heart Internet which offers free webspace for one domain, so if you want to start building a site yourself, there is no extra cost initially... they offer a range of hosting packages (assuming website gets more popular, the free hosting won't be enough).