Choosing a domain name for your philosophy website

Most computers connected to the internet are recognised by a unique number called an IP address. When you type an IP address into your browser you'll be taken to the website it relates to. These numbers, while no problem for a computer to remember, are hardly intuitive for humans. To make things easier these numbers are replaced by a word relevant to the site. This word is known as your domain name. Suppose you're about to put up Hume website you'll want to register a nice easy domain name for your visitors to remember - like www.david-hume.com

Unfortunately someone has already taken the name david-hume.com (uh-oh! it's one of those sites selling essays to American students) so you will have to think of another name for your site. To make things easier for yourself you can make whois database search.

Using the whois database to check domain names

Type "whois" into a search engine and you'll find numerous sites that will let you search the whois database. The search will tell you whether or not a particular domain name has already been registered. Click this link to search the whois at Godaddy. If you search for david-hume.com you'll find that it has been taken. You could then then check for david-hume.co.uk which has also been taken.

In order to register a domain for your Hume site you will need to find a name that no-one has taken yet. I searched the whois database for:

hume-philosophy.com
humesphilosophy.com
david-hume.org
david-hume.info

All were available on the 18th January 2005.

Domain names and Privacy

When you search the whois database you probably discovered that you could check to see who had registered a domain name if it was already taken. When you register a domain name you will asked if you want your domain to be listed privately. You will have to pay extra for this service but it means that your full name and address is not made available to anyone who does a whois search. Whether or not this is something you would want is up to you.

Domain names and search engine optimization

It is believed by some that your site will rank higher in the search engines if your domain name is a keyword that people would enter into a search engine. For example, if your site is about Hume's philsophy then the domain hume-philosophy.com would get better results that amazing-philos.com - howeverdomain names are seen as less important to search engine optimization these days and bare in mind that there is a whole lot more to getting a good position on the search engines than have a good domain!