The URL is www.zodiac4u.com – simple enough, quite easy to remember and ripe for content. At this point it’s just the one page, setting out a kind of mission statement about what I want to do with the site. Effectively I want to give people personalised horoscopes so at some point I’ll create a full enquiry form. Horoscopes are a particular pleasure of mine.

So the Godaddy thing – yeah, it’s alright. I’ve done it before, bought the expired domain name www.nottheonion.com – this did have some kudos with existing pages which I replicated (not content wise, just page name wise). It seemed to do very well for that reason, already has a pagerank (I think 2). I think it’s worth checking it out – it’s not as cheap as buying a domain name from scratch but with so few decent .coms available these days it’s a decent solution.

For anyone looking for SEO reasons, I also did a fair amount of research today about purchasing .net domains instead of .coms – my feeling is that seriously – it’s not worth it. If you can’t get the .com you want, unless your site has a particular reason to be particularly geo-centric (eg. .co.uk because the site is about the UK), you’re stuffed. My advice would be to keep looking, keep dancing around the domain registration places typing in keywords that kinda match, making sure your eventual URL isn’t going to be super massive.
The other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that at first of course you’re unlikely to get a high percentage of “type-in” traffic – that is, traffic from people typing your domain name straight into the address bar. Instead people are going to be searching for your site and that’s how they’ll find you. But DO people bookmark? In my experience, no, they don’t. Instead they remember the domain name and search for that!! If you haven’t got the .com, you’re scuppered! Definitely, buy the .com, not the .net (well, BOTH, if you can get the .com).