Creating a new web 2.0 site: choosing a domain name

I decided on a new site for building "how to" and "why for" information for do it yourselfers. I wanted a cool name for the site that also is descriptive and easy to remember. The hard part isn't really coming up with a name, it's coming up with a name that's available. I went back to siteground.com:

I typed in h2y4. That came back as unavailable.

I went to that site, just out of curiosity. I'm not sure what's going on there - some sort of personal family site.

I still liked the idea of the name, so I thought a bit and typed how2why4 into the box and pushed purchase. It came back as available, so I put in my credit card information.

Domain name is the official name for a site name. Wikipedia.org has an article on domain name that probably tells you more than you want to know, but also fills in the blanks.

I then got the following thank you note, directing me to wait for an email up to one hour for the account to be created.















I waited (about 5 minutes), and the email came. It directed me to siteground.com and my pre-existing login. If you're new to siteground, you'll also have to create an account.

[Warning: sharp turn ahead]

I went in and created a subdomain for my existing account using cpanel.

WTH, you might be saying right now, I thought we were starting from scratch. Well, I can't really, without creating a new siteground account. So here's what I need you to do. Try it, and document your experiences for the rest of us. I'm not talking about the whole experience of creating a site. Try creating a new domain name through site ground, including account creation, and send me an email at gedanzuki@comcast.net documenting your experience. Our you can post to the comments. I will publish IMHO the best one as a guest blog, if you want, and include it on how2why4.com.

This is web 2.0, after all. We'll create a place on how2why4.com for the experiences to be documented.

While we're waiting for the site to be spread to all the DNS services, I'll write the next post about why and how I chose to go with tikiwiki.

Subsequent posts will deal with site creation and installation of tikiwiki.

PS: I really want this to be an instance of web 2.0. For more information on what that is vs. the Web, see the wikipedia article, as a starting point.