Own Your Own Domain

Creating a dot com for your website it is crucial that you are the contact on the account, if you do not have a www. Yet we recommend Godaddy.com. Go to their website search for a name you want to use as your www. Website name .com, then check out. When checking out make sure the Registrant, Admin, Contact and Billing are all in your name. This will protect you from ever losing control of your website in the future, if you had an agency a friend or someone other than yourself register your website, do the following go to GoDaddy.com, at the bottom of the website you will see something called WHOIS, type in your www. And confirm that you are most important the registrant.

If you are not contact the person WHOIS, and explain to them that you need the registrations to be switched over to your name. We would recommend creating your own account with Godaddy.com and moving the domain into your account. If the registrant is changed by the third party, but still under their account they can switch contact information at any time. When the domain is in your account you have full and total control of your websites domain.

Side Note: when purchasing a domain when checking out at Godaddy.com unless your website people cue you otherwise, say no to all the additional services, hosting, email, private registration, etc. you can always add those back in if needed.

The importance of owning and controlling your website name also known as "Domain Name", here a few nightmare scenarios we witnessed firsthand, website company registered the domain name for a client and went out of business over night, the site was removed from the servers and when people typed in www. … the website did not come up thus the company that lost their website looked like they had gone out of business. In other instances the old website company became bitter when they learned that new website company was taking over the account. We have seen the domain be held hostage in the cases of litigation, over payments some parties they felt they were owed. And the most recent tracking down "The Guy" registered the domain and him not remembering where he had created the www.