"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                 DATE

In this issue: "A look at the basics - domain names"


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Hello! We're back after a brief absence while reorganizing 
our headquarters in a new location (see our web site for
addresses and numbers.)

Quite a few of our subscribers have asked us to cover some
introductory topics on the subject of web sites, so with this
issue we begin a look at the basics with a discussion of domain
names.

In what follows we'll take a brief look at:

* What is a domain name?
* What are the parts of a domain name?
* How do I get a domain name?
* What should I consider in choosing a name?
* What is domain name parking? 
* What are virtual domain names? What is virtual hosting?
* What about legal issues? Trademark? Copyrighting?
* The big piece of good advice.

WHAT IS A DOMAIN NAME?

Your web site is a place on the Internet where your web pages and the
programs associated with them can be found. Your domain name is just
the name of that place. When you enter a domain name in the location
window of your web browser, that tells the browser what web site you
want to look at.

It is not, however, like an address. Your browser actually needs
something called an IP number to find a web site. The IP number
is an address, and it works much like a street address that
identifies the location of a house or a telephone number that
identifies the line to a particular telephone.  

Once the browser knows this IP number it can go directly to the
computer on the internet where the web site is located, but in order
to find the IP number the browser must first go to a special computer
that it knows how to find and look up the IP number that corresponds
to the name you've given it. The computer where the IP number can be
looked up is called a "Domain name server." This is very much like
looking up a telephone number in the phone book by looking up a
person's name. Think of the domain name server as a telephone book
for browsers.

The advantage to doing it this way is that your domain name can stay
yours forever. If you want to move your web site to a different
computer - say a different hosting service - you just do it and all
that has to change is the information held in the domain name
server. Everyone still enters the same domain name and gets to the
same web site, and nobody knows it's in a new location on the
Internet.

WHAT ARE THE PARTS OF A DOMAIN NAME?

You've been entering things in your browser that look like this:

http://www.name1.name2.com

The 'http://' is not part of the domain name. It just identifies the
kind of Internet service being requested. (It stands for 'hypertext
trasnport protocol' and is the type of transmission that is used for
web pages.) The rest of the line is the actual domain name. 

The '.com' part tells what major division of the Internet the web site
is part of. It stands for 'commercial.' Others you may see are '.org'
for organization, '.edu' for educational, '.net' for networking, and
'.mil' for military. There are a lot of others and there are going to
be more. Most people feel that '.com' is the most prestigious for a
business site, and since most people feel that way I suppose that
makes it true.

The other strings of characters, separated by dots, name the
particular computers on the .com network that the web site lives
on. There may be only one string here so that you have something like
http://myname.com or you may have something more complex like
http://thispart.ofthatthing.com which would say that there was a
network of computers named 'ofthatthing' and that one computer on that
network was named 'thispart.' You usually only see this where a large
organization has many machines.

Finally, the 'www' is just like the other parts. It's a relic of the
days when only big organizations had web sites and they devoted a
whole machine to them which was traditionally given the name of www.
For this reason lots of people think it's a necessary part of a web
address so they apply for a domain name of 'www.mysite' and then it is
necessary because it becomes a part of their domain name.

Don't do this. Just apply for the domain name you want and leave out
the www. If people put in the www by mistake, the browser will find
you anyway. However, if you include it as part of the domain name you
apply for, then everyone MUST put in the www to get to your web site.

HOW DO I GET A DOMAIN NAME?

You have to pay a small fee to a registration agency who will ensure
that your name is unique and will see to it that the computers that
tell your browser where that web site is located have the right
information. There used to be only one agency authorized to do this,
which was called "Internic" but now it's called "Network Solutions" and
many other agencies will also be authorized to perform this service.
You can find Network Solutions at http://networksolutions.com.

First you need to know where your web site will be located so you can
tell the registration agency how to find the IP number your domain
name should be associated with. You get this information from the
hosting service that owns the computer your web site will be placed
on. The hosting service will provide you with the names of two domain
name servers to provide to the registration agency.

Next you need to choose a domain name.  You can use letters or numbers
or dashes, and that's it. No spaces nor any other punctuation nor
symbols. Case doesn't matter, so MySite.com and mysite.com are all the
same thing as far as the browser is concerned. The Network Solutions
web page offers a way to check if a name is already taken, and so do
many other web sites. We have a handy place to check it on Sidereal's
"useful stuff" web page. Go to http://siderealdesigns.com, and choose
the useful stuff link.

Once you have these two things worked out it's just a matter of
filling out forms and paying your $70.

WHAT SHOULD I CONSIDER IN CHOOSING A NAME?

Quite a lot of things. For one, it should be easy to type and
remember. If it's very long people will make typos. People are averse
to jotting down long domain names, and lots of people don't know how
to use bookmarks. If it has to be long, break it up cognitively by
using hyphens or capitalization at strategic spots.

It should not lead to confusion with existing names even if it's not
exactly the same. If someone already has yourfavoritename.com, don't
register yourfavoritename.org. Doing so will only confuse people and
half your visitors will go to the wrong place, and you might even get
sued. Remember that millions of Internet newcomers think that '.com'
is a necessary part of a domain name and use it automatically, just as
they think the www is necessary.

In the same vein don't choose something that's just a letter different
or similar tricks. It won't help you if people wind up in the wrong
place by confusing the two.

Also, try to think of the kinds of confusion people might have anyway
and check out where they'll wind up. If you're Dr. Jones, and
DrJones.com is already taken, you might want to use DoctorJones.com,
but take a look at DrJones.com first and make sure he's not running a
pornography site, because some people looking for you are going to
wind up there.

Finally, the domain name is one of the things the search engines use
in determining the ranking a site gets for any given set of keywords
that a user enters to search for a topic. If at all possible, make
your domain name reflect your most important keywords.

WHAT IS DOMAIN NAME PARKING?

If you want to register a domain name but don't want to pay for
hosting an active web site, you can 'park' the name for a small fee
with most hosting services providers. This just gives the name an
address on the Internet that's associated with it for registration
purposes, but doesn't give you the facilities to put up web pages.
Network Solutions itself will park names for you.

There are two times you might want to do this. One is if you want to
reserve some names for future use but aren't ready to develop the site
or just want to keep anyone else from using that name. In this case
you can just park it on the same hosting service that your web site is
hosted on.

Another is if you want to grab the name before anyone else does but
aren't yet ready to go with your web site. If this is your situation I
strongly urge you to park it with the people you're ultimately going
to host your site with. The reason I say this is that in our
experience, registering a name is simple and easy, but getting it
transferred from where it's parked to somewhere else that it's going to
reside at eventually is usually a bureaucratic nightmare.

WHAT IS VIRTUAL HOSTING? WHAT ARE VIRTUAL DOMAINS? 

In the simplest case, a domain name points to a distinct machine
connected to the Internet.  Since computers can host hundreds of
average domains (those not in the million visitor per hour class) it
makes a lot of economic sense for many web sites to share one machine.
So we want to host many different web sites on one machine (called a
server) but each of them wants a distinct domain. Virtual hosting
using virtual domain names is a way of doing this.

If you just enter a domain name in a browser it will go to the web
site and find a page called index.php which is the 'home page' of the
site.  If you want to specify a particular page on a web site to a
browser you can do it like this: http://somesite.com/Mypage.html. In
this case, 'somesite.com' is the domain name and 'Mypage.html' is the
name of a particular page on that site. You can use this to go
directly to particular pages on a site without going through the home
page. (Upper or lower case matters after the slash (/) following the
'.com', but does not in the part preceding it.)

So, if you have one machine that's identified by a domain name, you
can still host lots of different web sites on it by using names like
http://somemachine.com/site1, http://somemachine.com/site2, etc. where
site1 and site2 are the home pages of different web sites all on the
same machine. The traditional way of designating this, which you will
see occassionaly, is to use '~' as the first character of the site name,
as in http://somemachine.com/~site1. Then that is the actual address by
which the web site 'site1' must be addressed on the internet. These are
non-virtual domain names for these sites.

Now this works perfectly well as a means of reaching these sites, but
since 'somemachine.com' is the name of someone else's machine and does
not reflect your business at all, it is felt more prestigious to have
a single, simple domain name and look as though you own your own
computer and aren't a small operator sharing space with a lot of other
people. So by now, having a business web site that has a /~name form of
address really is the mark of an amateur operation. Furthermore, a
plain domain is easier to remember, shorter to put on business cards
and other marketing materials, and better for getting search engine
placement.

Thus a scheme was devised in which all the domain names hosted on a
machine would be assigned to the same IP number and the browser would
go to that machine for all of them. Then the local machine knows which
pages to send the browser to for that domain name and performs a
second, local address lookup to send out the right site's pages. This
way all the web sites hosted on a machine can have their own special
domain name and not have to be a /~somebody appended to a hosting
service's domain name.

In this case, 'mysite.com' and 'yoursite.com' both have the same IP
number associated with them on the Internet at large, but locally the
server software on the host machine knows the difference and sends out
the right thing.

A domain name set up this way is called a "virtual domain name" and
setting up a machine to handle things this way is called "virtual
hosting." If you're in business and not just setting up a personal
page to display your bottle-cap collection, and you're not a
mega-corporation that needs a whole machine for your web site, it's
definitely the way to go. Virtual hosting will only cost you a very
little bit more per month than non-virtual hosting.

WHAT ABOUT LEGAL ISSUES? TRADEMARK? COPYRIGHTING?

Like all things related to Internet law, this area is confused. The
courts haven't had time to create precedent and the legislators don't
understand the issues. Here are some basics:

A domain name may be considered a form of property. There have been
court rulings recently in which it was so-treated. It may be possible
to seize a domain name in a suit or bankruptcy litigation just as any
other asset.

A domain name can be challenged for trademark or copyright
infringement. It is no longer legal to register someone else's
trademark as a domain name and then force them to buy it from you if
they want to use it. On the other hand someone can sue you for your
domain name if it resembles their trademark.

Registering a domain name does not necessarily qualify as using it for
purposes of establishing trademark. A recent ruling held that a parked
domain name not actively used in commerce did not qualify for
trademark protection.

THE BIG PIECE OF GOOD ADVICE.

If you are thinking you may want a domain name someday, register it
now.  Let me say it again, REGISTER IT NOW. As it is you're probably
going to have to struggle to get a good domain name that does what you
want and isn't already taken, but if it's there now it will surely be
gone tomorrow. (rabidskunk.com is still available, but vulture.com is
taken by a venture capitalist.)

If you need help doing this, contact us.

Good luck!

Jamie


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