Domain names are the names used to describe your company or organisation which are referenced to your specific website and email servers. What's specifically important is that domain name registration and management can be expensive and time consuming if you jump too soon and buy from a registrar you are not going to have your website hosted with.

Often registrars will not allow you use hosting servers which are not theirs, they often charge high transfer prices, locking you into hosting on their servers, this may be good value - but often its expensive, offer poor performance and lack essential facilities which you may only get at additional cost. Before you buy a domain check;
- Transfer costs to another registrar, management costs of domain DNS changes.
- What is the transfer process, is it allowed?
- Can you define your nameserver's, i.e. host elsewhere?
- Hosting facilities, can they provide what you need, ASP pages, cgi or perl.
- Who is listed as the Admin and Technical contacts for the domain.
If any of these seem like 'red tape' or expensive, don't buy your domain from them.

Website hosting is a huge market place, millions of companies and individuals will have web hosting for sale all over the world, where do you start? Web hosting can be split into two main areas UNIX and Windows hosting. Which you chose will greatly depend on what you want your website written in, standard HTML will run on both - but generally php, cgi and mysql applications run on UNIX based servers for example Linux. While ASP websites usually run on Windows servers. Which ever you chose is up to you, but look out for these;
- Your own web space and pop3 email facilities, most site need no more than 50 to 250MB, don't be tempted by big storage in the first instance.
- Bandwidth is managed per month, anything between 250 and 1000Mb will be more than sufficient for your first website, don't pay for what your not going to use, you can always upgrade later if needed.
- Don't be tempted by 'unlimited' there's no such thing, something somewhere will be limited, its an advertising catch - to make you think your getting something for free, your not - ultimately it means its a 'free-for-all' for the memory, disk or bandwidth.
- FTP access, make sure you can access your website anytime to allow you to do updates and changes to the website.

Its no good having a brilliant website on a slick hosting server if no one visits your site. Budget for search engine promotion and optimisation, this can be no more than paying for an ad in a local paper, and it will ensure you get to more people.

There's some big changes in the SE arena, AltaVista together with AllTheWeb once a major players have now been sidelined, with Inktomi after being brought by Yahoo - Yahoo also has a huge interest in Google, although Google is under attack because it's change of search methods has produced questionable results and has turned the rankings upside down. This leaves us with a number of key Search engines to promote to.

- Google - Still allows free submissions, but pay-per-click is still very popular
- MSN - Microsoft's web services tool, allows some free submissions but prefers to sell 'paid submission'
- Open Directory (DMOZ) - a free submission system for non-business websites, this is used extensively by other search engines.

What comes out of this investigation is that 'paid submission' is becoming the only way to get business sites online and listed. Paid submission has some advantages, initially is the short time to get your site listed on that SE, the other is regular crawls of your site, paid submission SE's re-crawl your site as often as weekly to ensure any changes are updated in the index, this is the only real method of Search Engine optimisation or getting your site on page one, each change can be watched and modified to ensure your site continues up the rankings.

The other method is linking with other websites and pages, this has proved to be flawed process as was seen with Google's recent changes, Google made big allowances for the number of links to a website or web page, believing that the more pages were linked the more relevant it was, this has changed and now almost all of the rankings winners on Google have taken a tumble off the top slots.

There's still much to be gained from well formed meta tags and free site submission to the remaining smaller SE's, Overture, Gigablast, Exactseek, HotBot, Northern Light and the like, to ensure your website is in the index and findable - even if its not on page one.

- Portals, I am yet to find anyone who has been caught out by these, they promise page one listing on all search engines for your website, through their portal. Don't be taken in, what they promise is not deliverable, when you complain they take away the portal page and your left high and dry, no index listing and unable to be found on the search engine. When we promote a website, we do just that, not a portal page.

Anyone who claims they can get you on page one of any major SE is from another planet and just wants you to part with your cash. Getting to page one is hard work and requires constant changes and modifications.

- Site submission to 4000 search engines, I find it difficult to believe there are 400 SE's - don't be taken in by these ads, most are just country specific major SE's like google.co.uk and most take feeds directly from the dozen or so major SE's or directories. Many SE's are simply here today and gone tomorrow. Besides look around at the SE's your friends and family use, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Lycos, AV, MSN, HotBot, Overture and maybe 2 or three more.