Work Abroad

So how do you start?

First, you need to buy a domain. This should be strongly related to your idea or concept for your website or else be a catchy new name like www.kazaa.com that doesn’t men anything but stays in the mind. Domains only cost around $10 a year but don’t expect to be able to buy exactly what you’re looking for – www.goodidea.com was bought a long time ago. In fact, every singular word in the English language already now belongs to someone. More than that, every single 3 letter or digit-dot-com has been bought up and almost all the four letter combinations have also gone.

Your most ingenious one word domain spark of brilliance has probably been bought already http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonclark/

What you’re looking for is a catchy combination of words that people will remember, preferably without you having to spell it out for them. So if you’re running a site about French cinema, www.frenchfilms.com will probably no longer be available but a combination like www.filmsenfrancais.com might still be open.

Then again www.filmsoffrance.com might be a better bet – check what’s available on domainchecker.com and then ask everyone you meet what they think of the name and if they like the sound of it. You need a good brand for your site and if it’s catchy and descriptive then that’s 20% of the battle already won.

Then you need to host your site on a server – one of the giant computers which are the nuts and bolts of the internet. Server costs can be between $100-500 a year depending on how much space you need. Files of text and images won’t take up much space but full length audio and video files will – then again you can always host the latter on free sites like youtube and just imbed them on your site.

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