My own domain name

VI

Marketing Dyad is my name, and marketing is my game. With this, one of the first things I did in my personal digital marketing journey was to purchase my own domain name. Even through the simplest of tasks, I learn new things, and—for personal reasons, if nothing else—that’s why I think they’re worth documenting. For instance: I quickly learnt that one isn’t actually able to purchase a domain name, but merely register it for use over a certain period of time. I’ve come a long way from the days where I didn’t know what a DNS server was, or how to go about fixing the problem of a no-longer-active (read: registered) domain.

Why the importance of having my own domain? Would www.marketingdyad.wordpress.com or www.marketingdyad.squarespace.com not serve just as well? And for me, personally, I think this question can be differentiated from the why of a brand name or the need to craft an identity in the first place.

The first reason is professionalism. Something as simple as a domain name free of other commercial affiliations subtly screams (as subtle as one can scream, at any rate): “Legitimacy! I’m different! You can take me seriously!” to potential employers, recruiters, and whoever else comprises my following.

This segues nicely into my second reason, which is the attaining of to my a non-Gmail/Outlook/Live etc. email account. I suppose that this point is particularly salient because an email address is the first thing the HR person checking the email inbox you’re sending your job or internship application into is able to make a judgement upon.

Nothing rings truer than the old adage: First impressions count.

And, as a bonus, this would be something I would be able to put in my email signature—an additional demarcator differentiating my application from the dozens of others received in recruiter inboxes.

I decided to go with GoDaddy (nothing wrong with using the popular and trusted option in this case), and paid for a 3-year registration. My next step was to create my own website, and attempting to do so, realised that website hosting would accrue yet another additional expense I hadn’t factored in (see what I mean about cataloguing the little things you learn?). Whilst website builders abound, those offering the option of using one’s own domain name for free certainly weren’t nearly as proliferate as I might have hoped.

I finally found free website hosting with 000webhost.com, and was pleasantly surprised by the aesthetics of the website templates on offer. However, due to the limited functionality of 000webhost’s free website hosting package, I decided to use a separate email hosting solution (a quick Google search determined Zoho.com as a popular and reliable option). After many frustrating hours of jumping through hoops, I finally got it working through the desktop and mobile email clients (namely, the native iPhone mail app). Certainly, familarising myself with terms like IMAP, POP, nameservers and CNAME proved to be an informative learning exercise.

Technology most certainly isn’t my forte (as you may be able to tell), but hopefully, I’m going part of the way to addressing the issue.