This one’s for beginners. If you’re a veteran webmaster, no need to read on.
A domain is a site’s first impression, and its front door — visitors have to type the domain to get in. So choosing one matters.
Start with the TLDs — there are more than you can count: COM, NET, ORG, CN, and plenty of uncommon ones. How do you choose?
Most people know to prefer COM. Why? First-mover advantage: COM was used earliest and is the most familiar. I remember when I first played with websites in high school I used a free .TK domain, and when I told classmates about it they couldn’t reach my site. Why? Because they added ”.COM” after the ”.TK”. So COM really has sunk in. People who build sites or work with computers can tell the difference, but most people aren’t specialists and will always tack a ”.COM” onto the end, because they’ve decided a website is just “WWW.XXX.COM” and nothing else. So pick COM if you can.
There’s another reason: if you pick NET and work hard promoting it, most people will end up at the COM version and your traffic leaks away.
What if the COM is taken and you don’t want to buy it? As things stand, CN is the next best after COM. If that’s gone too, go .COM.CN. If you’re unlucky and that’s gone, NET. If even that’s gone, consider a hyphen — like this site: everything related to “renfei” was taken, so I had no choice but to add a hyphen, making it www.ren-fei.com. That’s why when I promote it I avoid saying the domain out loud and use hyperlinks, QR codes, and so on instead — otherwise people easily forget the hyphen and land on someone else’s site.
Last piece of advice for new webmasters: after registering, check the Whois information and confirm whose name the domain is under. Some registrars put the domain in their own name rather than yours. Watch out for that.