Personal home pages, business home pages, news articles, retail sites, government sites, the figures are mind boggling! From November of 1997 to November of 1999, total web pages grew from 320 million to 830 million! And the number will continue to grow exponentially as more people gain Internet access. One of the reasons for this vast increase is because people are creating their own personal web pages like there is no tomorrow! I believe that within 3 years, most people connected to the Web will have their own personal website. Admit it, haven't you at least thought about having a web page with your name on it? Imagine it, big as life! www..org, your portal to prestige, convenience and networking possibilities!

Personal web pages can be used for current addresses, resumes, life history, goals, pictures and any other information that you want others to have. Or create an extended family website that would be a 1-stop information resource where all family members could keep information current, show their pictures, tell what they are presently doing, show where they are living and talk about what they are working on. Each family member would have a subdirectory linked to the main page, such as www..com/, along with an email address @.com. Privacy can also be assured by requiring a password before anyone can view your site.

But think, what is the one thing that every one of these web pages needs? Bingo! an unique address! And this is where trouble appears. Believe it or not, your name is probably already registered to someone else! While there may be thousands of John Smith's, there are currently only a few easy ways to set up a web page called Johnsmith. The main ways are with a .com, .net and .org. Additionally every nation has its own designation such as .uk for the United Kingdom, or .to for Tonga. Some countries require that you live there in order to use their designation, while others see it as a lucrative revenue stream to sell the designation to people desperate for an easy to remember address.

Finding a good web address is made even more difficult since many organizations will register all permutations of their name to prevent imitators and gripe web sites. I first came to grips with this when I tried to register Morgan.com. It seems that the J.P. Morgan corporation has taken all of the morgan.com, net, and org site names out of availability. And lets face it, look in the phone book and there are hundreds of families named Morgan in there. Based on how hard it is to find any available name with Morgan in it, these people are gobbling up web addresses like there is no tomorrow! And who can blame them? Once someone registers a web address, they can keep it as long as they keep on paying the yearly registration! They do not even need to have a web site up!

But cheer up! If you are flexible, there are other ways to get a good web address. Your Internet provider will often host your web page and include 5 to 20 megabytes of web space as a member benefit. The downside is that your name is just a part of the provider's name, such as users. .com/. If you belong to a smaller provider, you will be able to get a name that is very similar to your own. As the provider becomes larger, the competition for popular names gets fierce. There are also several commercial web sites on the internet that provide up to 20 megabytes for storage of your personal web site, but they will force anyone browsing your website to look at the floating advertising box that is on every page. Another problem is that your web address will have about 10-20 subdirectory names, which is too many for people to easily remember.

OK, you are now in a panic to find out if someone out there is using your name. How do you find out? ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the official non-profit corporation that keeps the Internet naming system in order. But they let other companies actually do all the work. There are hundreds of companies that will check out the names you want and tell you if they are available; most of them also offer web-hosting services for your newly acquired web name. One of my favorite's is a Canadian Company called Net Nation at http://www.netnation.ca, There you can find out if any of the .com, .net, .org, .to, .nu and .cc suffixes are available, just by putting in the name you would like to search for. If the name you want is taken, it will even tell you who currently owns it! Once you have decided on a name, registration cost varies depending on what country you are registering with, and what company is registering your name. I have seen a low of $17.00 per year and a high of $50.00 per year. The site you are registering with might also charge an additional fee.

So go and register your name now! With 20,000 domain names registered every week, you can't afford to wait! Next Month we will talk about some great low-cost ways to get a web site address, followed by the last article dealing with some of the easy, and not so easy ways to create content for your web site.

The Association of Computer User Groups (APCUG), of which this club is a member, brings this article to you. Stephen Morgan is the Program Chair for the Plateau PC Users Groups in Tennessee, and also serves as the Regional APCUG Advisor for North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

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