Thursday 1 November 2007

Domain Registration Made Easy

A note to everybody thinking of registering a domain and having a website developed. Make sure you register the domain yourself. I'm saying this because of some nasty practices used by web developers in the Cairns region. Here are just two recent examples:

1. One client's domain was about to expire, the contact details at the domain registrar were to the previous web developer and even after repeated phone calls to said previous web developer, the client was ignored, the domain expired and was immediately picked up by one of those irritating automated processes that go around finding expired domains - the end result being that the client lost their established domain name

2. The second example pertains to the same previous 'web developer' (note the use of inverted commas for sarcasm purposes) whereby the domain registration was done by them on the client's behalf but the client was never given the domain registrar password. This time the email contact details were the client's email address but since registration the client has cancelled this email address and the previous web developer has lost the password. The mess we now find ourselves in is that we cannot login to the domain registrar, cannot follow the procedures for lost password and subsequently cannot re-host the website.

My advice to people who are thinking of registering a domain is:

1. Do it yourself.
2. Do it with a reputable domain registrar - we at Ion e-Business use www.studiocoast.com.au.
3. If you're an Australian business use a .com.au extension. By all means purchase the .com as well but the .com.au should be your main web address.
4. Make sure that the email you use on the contact details is one you're not going to cancel in the future.
5. Archive all emails you receive from the domain registrar during the registration process and print a couple of copies that you can file away somewhere safe.

Then, when you're ready to have your website developed, give these details to your web developer so they can do their thing.