WordPress® Web Design For Dummies®

Establishing Your Domain

You’ve read the hype. You’ve heard the rumors. You’ve seen the flashy Web sites powered by WordPress. But where do you start?

Domain names: Do you own or rent?

In reality, when you “buy” a domain name, you don’t really own it. Rather, you purchase the right to use that domain name for the period of time specified in your order. You can register a domain name for one to ten years. Be aware, however, that if you don’t renew the domain name when your registration period ends, you lose it — and most often, you lose it right away to someone who preys on abandoned or expired domain names. Some people keep a close watch on expiring domain names, and as soon as the buying window opens, they snap up the names and use them for their own Web sites, hoping to take advantage of the popularity that the previous owners worked so hard to attain for those domains.

The first steps toward installing and setting up a WordPress Web site are making a decision about a domain name and then purchasing the registration of that name through a domain registrar. A domain name is the unique Web address that you type in a Web browser’s address bar to visit a Web site — for example, wordpress.org and google.com.

I emphasize unique because no two domain names can be the same. If someone else has registered the domain name you want, you can’t have it. With that in mind, you may need to ...