Justin Gable

On the path to claiming your own piece of hyperspace real estate, purchasing a domain name is a good place to start. If you want to learn what a domain name is and get some tips for buying one, keep reading, but if your itching to blow some money click here to skip to the spendin’ part.

Examples

• www.ebay.com
• www.google.com
• www.justingable.com

Purpose

In the simplest explanation possible; a domain name represents a specific place (directory) somewhere in the vast network of computer servers, what we web professionals like to call the “internet”, with an easily memorable name. If we didn’t have them we’d have to remember web addresses such as http://74.125.19.147/ if we ever wanted to visit Google.

Dot Whatever

Those little letters that appear at the end of a domain after the “.” (com, net, org) are called Top-Level Domains (TLD). Each one has it’s own reason for existance; the 3 most common are:

• com: (Commercial) officially intended to designate commercial entities
• org: (Organization) mostly associated with churches, charities and other non-profits
• net: (Network) intended to be used only for the computers of network providers

Of course anyone can buy a domain name with either of these extensions, and these “rules” I listed are generally not followed. When buying your own domain, however, get a .com if at all possible, it’s the one that most people will assume is your TLD when entering in your address.

What’s in a name?

• it must contain 3 to 63 characters
• it can contain the letters a-z as well as numbers 0-9
• it can contain a hyphen (-) but it cannot start or end with one
• it cannot contain spaces or any other special characters

Where to buy

There are many places that will sell you domain names, some will try and entice you with $1 domains or even free… DO NOT FALL FOR THIS! Usually they want you to sign up for their hosting service before they “give you” the domain name of your choice. But wait there’s more! That domain you were just “given”, you don’t own it, the people you bought it through do. So, when you go to change hosts for whatever reason, they will most likely not give you the domain name back.

It is best to buy through a 3^rd party and there are two that I recommend, GoDaddy (you know, the ones that run all the ads during the Super Bowl with the skanky women) and NetworkSolutions. Both offer nice controls to manage all your domain names and have excellent customer service. GoDaddy is who I use and they’re the ones I’m going to walk you through buying your own domain name.

The Walk-thru

 
Buying a domain name on Godaddy.com from Justin Gable

Wrapping up and looking ahead

Hopefully I’ve helped clear the air around getting your own domain name. However, if there is something you feel I left out or something I went over needs some more elaboration, leave me a comment.

In the next tutorial I’m going to show you how to purchase your own hosting and setup your domain name to point to your shiny new server space.

I have some more elating news, well at least I’m excited about it; yesterday Charles and I signed a lease for our very first office! We are both looking forward to moving out of our dark, depressing home offices into something a bit more professional. You know, somewhere you don’t have to hide your boxers if a client comes by.

The office is on the 3rd floor of a historical downtown building, the Hotel Virginia (built in 1920), that has recently been completely renovated and turned into loft style office spaces. Exposed brick walls, polished concrete floors and views over the city - the space exudes creativity.

Since we just signed the lease, the drywall and final pieces haven’t been put in, but we’re supposed to be able to move in at the beginning of September. We have to send over paint samples to the developer within the next couple days as well as marking off where we want our power/phone/data outlets. We also have a trip to IKEA planned for later this month.

Our one year anniversary of being in business is coming up next month (September 3rd) and getting an office by this time was one of our original goals when we started out. Thankfully this feels more like a natural progression that isn’t being forced. Element really has been doing well and I can’t wait to see where we are next year.

Hey, everyone! I’m very excited to introduce a blog series that I’m going to be posting starting this week titled Blog Yourself (if someone has a better name please let me know :) ). I will show you how to create your own blog from start to finish. I wanted to breakdown the seemingly complicated process of setting your own blog up and make it easy for anyone interested in blogging.

I have noticed some of my wife’s blogging buddies and many others using services such as Blogger and TypePad to run their blog. These services may be an appropriate option for some, but are actually quite limiting to those seeking more control and a more professional image. For bloggers falling into this category, I want to offer insight on migrating their blog to their own web host as well.

Let me give you an overview of what I will be covering and who may be interested in this series:

What I will cover

• Purchasing a domain name
• Finding and purchasing web hosting
• Installing and configuring blogging software (WordPress)
• Free applications used to setup and customize your blog
• Free web services that show you detailed statistics for your blog
• How to customize your blog with themes and plugins
• Tips on best practices and better usability
• Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to give your blog a higher ranking in various search engines such as Google and Yahoo!

Who may be interested in this series

• non-bloggers who would like to start their own blog
• bloggers who use a hosted blogging service such as Blogger or TypePad and who would like more control by hosting it themselves (I will show you how to migrate your posts and comments from your current blog)
• bloggers who want to learn useful tips on customizing and promoting their blogs

Who/what this series is not intended for:

• those looking for WHAT to write about on their blogs (I’m just giving you the tools, not the content)
• people intending to use blogs to spam
• carnies

I am planning to go into as much detail as possible on each subject, even splitting individual topics into multiple posts if they require more attention. I will try to include as many screenshots as well as videos (if requested) of the tutorials. Feel free to post comments asking questions or send me a message on my contact page.

Cleaning out my RSS feeds this morning I came across an article reviewing a web application called ShiftSpace. The application allows collaborative annotating and editing of any web page on the internet by using an overlay. So why am I writing about this? Well, Charles and I had been working on an in-house project that did the same exact thing. Every single feature we dreamed up was in there, it’s as if these guys read our notes! (they didn’t)

This isn’t the first time we’ve been working on a project only to find someone else has released an identical application midway through development, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Developing for the web is a two-edge sword; you can develop an application and release it to the masses in a very short time, much faster than it takes to develop a physical product. The downside is, so can someone else.

To their credit, ShiftSpace did a decent job with it, I’m happy to see an idea executed well. They do have room for improvement however… Requiring the user to install Firefox, install an add-on and then install the script just to be able to use the application? Come on guys, bad form.

For us, we have a few other in-house projects that we are working on at the moment, and we have no shortage of new ideas. We even have an in-house project that we have been working on for almost a year now that is nearing completion, and should be released at the end of October. Score.