Your identity on the world wide web is important: often, people will want to find out information about your products or services and will guess your domain name, some companies have after all, made a business out of speculatively registering domain names. So it's important that you consider registering a domain name that is reasonably intuitive. After all, which of the following is more intuitive for a company called John Smith Ltd:

www.johnsmithltd.co.uk
www.freeweb.biz.com/homepage/johnsmith

For that matter, which one will be easier to remember or to put on a business card? Another benefit of registering your own domain is that if you decide to change your Internet Service Provider, you don't need to advise all your contacts of the new e-mail and web site addresses and change them on all your stationery, they remain the same.

You can register domain names such as:

.com

.co.uk

.net

.org

.biz

.info

.uk.com

.uk.net

.eu.com

.org.uk

.me.uk

.us.net

Here is a guide to the various top and second level domains you can register for your company or organisation.

Avoid offensive names and other people's trademarks.

New domain names must be three letters or more and consist only of A-Z,0-9 and dashes. If a two word name such as johnsmith.com is not available, consider hyphenating it as john-smith.net. You could also consider using plural; johnsmiths.com.

You can register as many domain names as you like. If you don't want them later, just let them expire.