Step 4: Buy a domain name

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 4: Buy a domain name

A domain name is the website (or blog) address, e.g. http://www.getmecooking.com

You don’t need a domain name if you are just starting out, but if you do have one:

• Your blog will look more professional
• It will be easier for visitors to remember your blog address
• If you move blogs or hosting providers, you can take your domain name with you

 Some easy steps for getting a domain name are: 

• Think of some names (this is the hardest part!)
• See if your name is available with the domain suffix you want. In order to protect your name, you may want to register multiple domain name suffixes (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .info, etc.). you can use one domain and point all of the other domains do your preferred domain. For example, if you go to http://www.getmecooking.co.uk, you will be redirected to http://www.getmecooking.com
• If a name you want is not available, you can see if it is in use, on retention or due to expire soon
• Before you buy it, check to see if the name is available on twitter, facebook and any other social networks that you think you might want to use in the future 

We recommend Go Daddy for the whole domain name process – they have great tools for finding a good one, seeing if it is available, purchasing and managing it.

The www debate:

Some websites use www the prefix, some dont and some allow either.

• Without www: http://getmecooking.com
• With www: http://www.getmecooking.com

It is good practice to enforce the www because:

• Non-technical users expect to see it there
• It makes it clear that it is a website and not an FTP (or other) type of site
• Static content (including cookies and images) can be properly managed
• Having www and non www addresses can cause search engines to think that you have 2 copies of the site and they may penalise you for that (i.e. for copying data). Some search engines such as Google allow you to tell them which is the preferred domain, but you don't want to do this as it is manual effort

Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)