Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Choosing Your Online Identity

A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, represents the unique address for each page on a Web site or document posted online. Your Web site might be made up of several Web pages, each with a unique URL.

Before you start creating Web pages, your first order of business is to determine your domain name, or the part of the URL that specifically identifies the name of your Web site. We break down a typical URL in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: A URL, deconstructed.

Although your Web site normally has only one domain name, it has more than one URL. The URL for the home page, or entrance page, of your site often looks the same as your domain name. Every page of your site, however, has a unique URL, such as

• www.myveryfirstwebsite.com: The home page
• www.myveryfirstwebsite.com/index.html: The home page (the same as omitting the index.html portion of the URL)
• www.myveryfirstwebsite.com/services.html: The Web page that contains information about the services you offer

Approaching your domain name carefully

You can take one of two opposing approaches when you select your domain name:

• You have an existing business or have already named your start-up. If that's the case, you usually should match (as closely as possible) your company's name to the domain name. Using your ...