Let us try to understand the entire web design scenario through a systematic approach.
First of all, you must know, that you need a unique identifier in the cyberspace just like your postal address. This is called the Domain Name. You select a name of your choice, check the availability and book the domain. If somebody has already occupied your desired domain you need to modify it a bit in order to keep it unique keeping the vision/
ideology in tact. There are several extensions and restrictions, which we shall discuss later.
Let us assume your domain is mydomain and anybody can view your pages as http://www.mydomain.com from remote corners of the world. However, once you have selected a domain name, you need to confirm the availability of the same. Looking at http://whois.com one can check this. There are several registrar companies, who facilitate the domain booking services.
Certain extensions are available to all like .net, .org and .com. There are certain extensions that are used for some very specific purpose like .gov or .edu. Generally .gov domain is applicable for public houses and government departments; on the other hand
.edu is applicable to the research & education segment only. The growing demand of Internet and domain names have further created more country specific extensions like
.us or .in, where .us stands for United States and .in stands for India.
There are people, who book some common domains and wait for the prospective clients Page 6 of 42
The Internet Marketing Online Goldmine who ask for domains. So, even if you don"t find your most wanted domain, you can rummage around to see who the owner of that particular domain name is and it is also possible that the person may be willing to sell you his domain at very premium prices.
The advantage is that there are various companies, who allow you to create a domain name under their domains and start working. Geocities of Yahoo, freewebhosting are some of them, and they literally don"t need to pay anything for them. So, your domain name may look like geocities.mydomain.com. The obvious question remains as to why do they then allow one to create domains free of cost. The answer being very simple they want to display banners and advertisement of themselves or the sponsors to earn. That"s why you can find so many advertisements in the geocities series.
Nevertheless today you can book a domain name (off course if the subject is available) at a price of $10 to $15 per annum.