technical stuff

domain name

The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) controls all domain name matters in Australia.

Domain names are like internet business names. A domain name is yourname.com.au . The components are:

• au - the national domain, in this case Australian but it could also be nz (New Zealand), fj (Fiji) or whatever. The absence of a national designator indicates a USA site (having invented the internet, they only envisaged other countries needing a national designator) or an international site. Obtaining domain names without a national designator is cheap, poorly controlled and to be avoided, unless genuinely justifiable;
• com - the second level domain or type of site, in this case a commercial site but could also be asn (association) or whatever and
• yourname - a unique and legally justifiable name, e.g. based on a registered business name, A.B.N., Certificate of Incorporation or similar. This name is important to seach engines and the sites ranking so always consider this when establishing a desired name, e.g. abacuswebworks has more potential than 40degreessouth.

New domain names are obtained by contacting an auDA accredited registrar. We use and recommend Melbourne IT. We can register a domain name on your behalf or you can register it yourself. With all the right information, registration takes about 2 days to implement.

domain name - second level

• asn.au - For incorporated associations, political parties, trade unions, sporting and special interest clubs.
• com.au - For commercial entities, such as companies (with ACN as registered through ASIC), and businesses (registered with state governments).
• net.au - For commercial entities, such as companies (with ACN as registered through ASIC), and businesses (registered with state governments).
• id.au - For individuals who are Australian citizens or residents.
• org.au - For charities and non-profit organisations.
• edu.au - For educational institutions registered at federal or state level.
• gov.au - For federal, state and local government bodies.

You should always firstly consider the .com.au version of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar. If you register .id.au, .net.au or any of the other available extensions and your competition has the .com.au version, then you've just lost a potential customer.

 

domain name - yourname.

Size does matter - In the case of domain names the smaller the better. Of course, short domain names are harder to find but if you can find one it has a number of advantages such as, it's easier to brand, easier to remember and it's harder to misspell.

Easy to remember - Try to get a name that's easy to remember and sounds good. Take learntofly.com.au for example, that's an easy to remember name. Generic words are best for this but since these are mostly gone at this stage. You may need to look for combinations of specific and generic names which rhyme and sound good together, e.g. flywithfritz.com.au.

Relate to your business - If you use keywords which are related to your business industry you will help your search engine rankings. What's even better is if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your domain name, this way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.

Avoid similarities - This means you should avoid choosing domain names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these people could end up on your competitors site rather than yours because they got confused over the two domain names.

 

hosting

Your web site must be hosted (stored) on a machine called a Server. Critical issues for a good server are that it:

• has a direct, permanent and fast connection to the internet;
• has routine maintenance, backup and replacement processes in place and
• has appropriate access to it.

We can provide hosting on our servers which are located in five world class data centers with multiple connections to provide you with superior speed, service and reliability.

 

delegation

Delegation is the process whereby the Registrar makes known to the internet community the Designated Name Server (DNS) on which you will host your domain/web site. This is initially usually the Registrars own server, whether or not you have elected to use them for hosting.

You need to arrange hosting and then make the delegation with your Registrar. Once a delegation has been made to a hosting Server then it can be accessed via the internet. This delegation process takes about 15 minutes to be useable and up to 2 days to be fully deployed worldwide.

Delegation details for our server are:

• Primary          ns1.taswebhosting.com
• Secondary     ns2.taswebhosting.com
  

We can make the delegation on your behalf or your can make it yourself. Once delegation has been made you can visit the site and will see something like this:

Index of / Name Last modified Size Description         Parent Directory 01-Oct-2006 18:12 -   cgi-bin/ 01-Oct-2006 18:12 -                   Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.yourname.com.au Port 80

You are now ready to start uploading files to your server.

 

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Uploading or FTPing files to your site necessitates the use of software to transfer the files from a computer to your server. This can be any number of hypertext markup language (HTML) compiler software programs or specific FTP programs. We use and recommend CuteFTP. Configuration details for our server are:

• Label: Your Name
• Parent folder: public_html
• Host Address: www.yourname.com.au
• User Name: As provided by hosting service
• Password: As provided by hosting service
• Log In Method: Normal

If we have constructed your site we will transfer the files for you. If we are only hosting your site we would expect that you will attend to this unless other arrangements are made.