As part of your web identity, it’s good to have your own domain name, like davehuffington.com or frogresearch.org: one that you control, that you can keep as you go from job to job, and that can be the basis of a permanent personal email address. If you start a new project or set up a company you’ll need a domain name too. It’s not unusual for net-savvy folks to have half a dozen.

If you want a domain name, you need to use a registrar. These are businesses from which you rent the right to use a particular domain name, on a yearly basis. You don’t own domain names: you rent them year-to-year, and when you stop someone else can snap them up. How much does it cost? Usually about US$10 a year; some unpopular domains, like anything.info, can be dirt cheap, while .nz domains are usually more (no surprise there).

What sort of domain should you get?

• .com is a good choice, because it’s the default domain for most web browsers
• .org might be better for a non-profit organisation
• .net used to be just for internet service providers, but now it’s often used for metaphorical ‘networks ‘
• .info is little-used but good for informational sites (like this one)
• .co.nz, .org.nz really imply that the site only relates to New Zealanders, plus they’re pricier. For more information on NZ domains, see our Domain Names Commission site.

Once you’ve figured out a possible domain name, go to a registrar and see if it’s available. GoDaddy is one of the biggest, and fine to use, though they do try to sell you lots of extra stuff you don’t need; I’ve found Hover much friendlier but slightly more expensive. If you want a New Zealand domain, there are registrars like iServe, Enlighten, or Freeparking. As always when evaluating competing websites, look for professional design and good Help pages.

At this stage, all you need is the domain name. The next stage is to point it at something: a free blog or your own hosted website. Some registrars will try to get you to add web hosting and all sorts of other services, but there’s no need at this stage; just secure your domain names and figure out the next step in your own time.

(One thing I would suggest: many registrars offer a free service where you can create a single email address using your new domain name—like dave@frogresearch.org—and have it redirect mail to an address of your choice, like davehuffington@gmail.com. This is a useful temporary fix until you set up web hosting, which will give you all the email addresses you could want. But more on that in a separate posting.)

Forget your stereotypes about blogs—they’re not just for people who want to post pictures of their cat and what they had for breakfast. Blog software is now the simplest way to create and maintain a website, which could be anything: a research portfolio, a conference news page, a writing forum, a lab report. Blogs let you create date-stamped postings, like an online diary, but they also can be used to manage calendars, lists of links, or ordinary static web pages.

Free

Blogger (now owned by Google), Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress.com are the four main solutions. Tumblr and Posterous are intended to be Blogs Lite: quick and easy places to post pictures and links. Blogger and WordPress.com are aimed more at text-heavy bloggers, and WordPress.com to me has better visuals.

One big issue is that your blog will by default be a subdomain of someone else—it’ll look like getnetsavvy.blogger.com or getnetsavvy.wordpress.com, which is a bit naff. If you register your own domain name, these blogs will let you use it either for free or a small fee. Free blogs may also post the occasional ad, and they don’t have all the features and modifiability of a more sophisticated blog. Nevertheless, they can be a good testing ground for you to try out blogging (you can export your postings and move them to a better blog later on), or to create a small, temporary site for a specific purpose. And you can’t beat the price.

Through a blog-hosting service

Typepad is a service which will host your blog for a monthly fee. It has several advantages of this over a free blog: you can use your own domain name, you have more flexibility to modify the appearance and functions, and you can host ads or run a business (if that matters). There are other similar hosting services for websites—SquareSpace gets good press. The monthly fees for these are not high—less than USD $10 a month. But to me, if you’re happy with paying a monthly fee, you might as well go the whole hog and sign up with a commercial web hosting package; most of these include blogging. A web host also has some additional benefits, like letting you have multiple email addresses and subdomains.

On your own web host

Most monthly web-hosting packages include the ability to have a Movable Type or WordPress blog. I’ve tried both, and think WordPress is the way things are going: unlike Movable Type, it’s open-source, and there’s a strong development community with lots of themes and plugins. I also find it a little easier to edit the source code and tweak the appearance of pages. Yes, if you go this road it’s well worth learning a little bit of technical web stuff, like HTML and CSS, so you can edit content and appearance more effectively, and you’ll need to keep your installation up-to-date and virus-free, but these are all useful transferable skills. At this point you’re managing an actual website; how comfortable you feel with that will determine whether you go with a free or web-hosted blogging solution.

The author Cory Doctorow has written an interesting piece on how you can use blog software to run a whole website yourself. It’s aimed at writers, but is just as relevant to academics.

If you’re a graduate or postgraduate student, you need a web space and email address that are independent of an institution—somewhere you can upload your publications, link to achievements, and supply contact information. Your target audience includes employers, potential collaborators, future students, funding agencies, and the media. I think the following are all important considerations:

• Your web identity has to be portable, so the address stays the same as you change institutions.
• It should use open standards such as HTML that aren’t going away soon, rather than proprietary formats that might go bust (like some ePortfolio companies) or change their terms and conditions tomorrow (like Facebook).
• If there’s a learning curve involved in creating that web space, the skills you gain should stay as useful as possible in the future.
• It should be simple enough for you to keep up-to-date, but should still allow you to demonstrate you have some internet savvy.
• It should be more than an online résumé; you should be able to showcase your actual skills and professional experience by linking to them or putting them on the page.
• And it should be your first result on Google.

To do this, I recommend the following steps.

1. Get a web-based independent email address
2. Register a domain name
3. Arrange some server space from a web host and point the domain name at it
4. Set up some email addresses, forwarding them to your main address
5. Create a simple blog as a basic website
6. Make your photos available online
7. Make your work accessible under a Creative Commons license

I’ll be blogging each of these steps as I run workshops and create handout for them.