Pet care begins at home... Having dreamt of running a small local business providing pet care at home our client engaged us to work with them to develop and promote their business idea. Having agreed a company name, logo and slogan the new business was online within five days.

Two months on and the small local business has a growing customer base who regularly visit the Petalone website. As new customers use the service they pass details to their friends and neighbours who by way of the website have access to the services, pricing, gallery and customer weblog where they can read some of the comments left by members of its client base.

Leading Supplier of Veterinary Instruments.. StarbroVet a leading UK supplier of high quality veterinary surgical instruments is one of the latest weBalyzer clients.

Prior to its positioning on the web StarbroVet did most of its sales and marketing through mail shots and advertising. Because its potential cutomer base was spread throughout the UK this was costly and difficult to maintain when new products and prices were introduced.

There are five basic steps to getting your site online, the first is choosing a “unique” domain name. A domain name makes up the address of your site and can end in .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, .tv etc. Domain names are also sometimes referred to as the "dot com name".

The second is registering/reserving the required "unique" domain name on your behalf.

Having selected and reserved the domain name we then move onto the third stage designing, building and testing your web site on our own web servers. Using your registered domain name we can provide client access to all development stages for immediate testing and feedback.

Once the web site is completed, we can then help you select a web hosting provider, this is the fourth step. The web host is where we publish your completed web site, load order forms, add functionality and maintain your site if requested.

The fifth and final stage in producing a fully functional website is transferring the final build to the hosting server. Following the upload a full functional test and search engine optimization will be completed.

If being found in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) is extremely important to you, we highly recommend creating a name that contains your major keywords instead of your company name.

The average surfer searches by subject, not by proper name. So why it may seem good to have a name like GloriasCardShop.com, you should really choose a name that includes keywords your target audience are likely to use when they search.

With that in mind, a name like Online-Card-Shop.com would be much better than GloriasCardShop.com. You can still list your company name and logo on your web pages, but we believe it's more important to make sure the domain name includes your important "search friendly" keywords if you want web users to find your site.

If you are just creating a website for a local service or business, getting traffic from all over the web may not be as important to you. This is because your customers will be local and you may want to grow your business in a specific area.

If this is the case, it may make more sense to register your company name and create business awareness locally instead of trying to capitalize on search engine presence.

For example, let's say you have a company called PetAlone and you provide a local pet care service, it’s likely that you can only cater to residents in this local area. Since you are only servicing local clients, you may not care if someone in Scotland can find your site in Google since they are not likely to become one of your customers.

In this case, it's not as important to register a name filled with "search optimized" keywords. You may decide to just reserve the company name, “PetAlone.com” or if UK only “PetAlone.co.uk”.

The preference for using “.com” domain names is generally based on other people’s knowledge of the web. Web users typically start searching for a site by entering the most likely “.com” web address addresse into their browser first before trying “.co.uk”. If a site is not found having typed the “.com” address they may then use “.co.uk”. If someone else has already registered a similar business using the “.com” name they may be filtering some of your potential clients.

Keep in mind, domain names are not the only factor weighed by search engines when deciding your rank. The content on your web pages and your site's popularity (inbound links from other sites) is very important too. However, it certainly doesn't hurt to make sure your name is optimized for maximum results.

To see if a domain name is available use the following link and type the name you want in the search box. The program will immediately tell you if the domain name you want is available. If the domain extension you would like is not available (the .com's are almost always taken) you can select one of the others. Using "all" will display the current registration status of the most popular extensions.

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Don't choose domain names that are too long and have too many syllables if you can help it. Names up to 63 characters long can be registered, but that doesn't mean you have to use all 63 characters.

You want your name to be easy to remember. Not everyone will bookmark your page initially so try to think of something that can be easily remembered -- although we realize this may be tricky since a lot of names are taken these days.

Use hyphens if your name is more than 3 words long (unless your name includes 3 short words). A name like carbuying.com doesn't really need a hyphen because it's readable the way it is. However a name like used-car-buying-scams.com looks better than usedcarbuyingscams.com since there are so many words in the name.

Protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, etc.) This deters people from copying your name. For example, if you own PetAlone.com you can also register PetAlone.co.uk and any other extension that's available. Multiple extensions can be pointed to your preferred domain using domain forwarding and will keep others (copycats) from registering and using them.

Domain names are registered on-line through accredited domain registrars. There are thousands of companies that offer domain registration services. However, some of them are more reputable than others, offer good customer service and provide you with a user-friendly interface.

Reserving a single domain name using webAlyzer is easy and is included in the cost of building your website. If multiple extensions or names are required we can register them at an additional cost (example costs shown below).

.co.uk yearly cost £2.99

.com yearly cost £8.89