Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
III
•
.com
is the
top-level domain
. There are only a limited number of top-level domains, or
TLD
s as
they're known; some are worldwide, such as
.com
and
.org
, and some are country-specific,
such as
.co.uk
.
WordPress-based domain names such as mygreatblog.wordpress.com are quite acceptable, and can
be branded fairly strongly, though not so much as a custom domain name. It's more widely
respected, and easier for people to remember, for you to have a domain name all your own, such as
www.mygreatblog.com. (People who hear that you're running “My Great Blog” are very likely to try
visiting www.mygreatblog.com, but are far less likely to try mygreatblog.wordpress.com.)
This section tells you how domain names are made up and how to get a good one for yourself.
WordPress.com Domain Names Versus Custom Domain Names
One of the biggest issues that faces bloggers starting a new WordPress blog is whether to have a
custom domain name or to just use the free domain name WordPress assigned to your blog.
The authors of this topic have used both approaches for their own main blogs. One of us (Smith)
has a custom domain name for Google Voice Daily, at www.gvDaily.com; the other (McCallister) has
a free domain name, metaverse.wordpress.com.
It's worth noting that the Metaverse domain name is a bit of reverse snobbery—achieving status by
not
spending money. The Metaverse blog is about open source software, and WordPress is famous
for being an example of a uniquely successful open source project. By keeping a WordPress.com
domain name, the Metaverse blog actually stands out more in the open source community than if it
had the custom domain name www.metaverse.com.
You have three choices when setting up your blog initially:
•
Plan to stick with a WordPress.com domain name forever
—In this case, your blog name, which
becomes the third-level domain for your domain name, needs to be unique within WordPress. If
it's not, WordPress forces you to choose another name.
•
Start with a WordPress.com domain name, but keep your options open for upgrading later
—
In this case, not only does your blog name need to be unique within WordPress, but you also
need to check that it's available as a second-level domain, along with the TLD
.com
, and then
hope the second-level domain and
.com
combination remains available until you choose to
upgrade.
•
Go to a custom domain name straightaway
—In this case, you need to do things a bit back-
ward. First make sure that the second-level domain is available, using a site such as
123reg.com; because you won't be letting people get used to a
.com
TLD, you can use a differ-
ent one instead, such as
.org
or
.edu
. You can then use the second-level domain you've identi-
fied as your blog name as well, but if that isn't available in WordPress, you can use a variant or
any name at all. Again, no one will be getting used to it; you'll always publicize your blog using
its own custom domain name.
