Selecting Your Domain Name

Selecting Your Domain Name
First things first, before you sign-up for the UMW Domains pilot you should have chosen your domain. What's more, we hope and pray you didn't choose hellokitty123unicorns.biz!

"What's a domain?" you ask. Well, it's an online URL address, something like google.com. For the Domain of One's Own pilot we're providing 300-400 students and faculty with domain names and web hosting as part of their curricular work at Mary Washington. Ideally the domain should be a personal name space that you'll initially experiment with as part of a course, with the idea you can ultimately take this space with you when your work is done at UMW.

The domain extensions available to you through this pilot are as follows: .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info, .co, and .me.

"What extension should I use?" Well, that depends on a number of factors, see this resource that explains the idea behind the various extensions. Also, if you want to see what domains are available use this site to search for domain names you might be interested in.

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We have a number of examples of previous students who have done this, Hassam Halim's site is an online space that showcases his work, education, and interests. Similarly, Caitlin Murphy's online portfolio features what is possible for showcasing one's talents and interests on the web.

The domain space you choose is ideally a space where you will continue to manage your academic and professional life online. With that said, we're open to various experiments and riffs upon the idea. If a group of students want to experiment with creating a collaborative research site or resource sharing site we'd love to explore the possibilities of beautiful dreamers building and designing sites that interact and educate on the open web. Just keep in mind we can't support commercial sites hosted through the Domain of One's Own project. While we fully support the idea of coming up with a resource others will pay for, we simply can't underwrite it with this pilot project. Think of it this way, we're doing the basic science here---the business end gets messy quick and this space is best used as a sandbox for a commercial site you build and maintain somewhere else. The idea behind this project is to manage your online identity through your own domain space. You can install and manage applications in your own web hosting account or point your domain to a third party service like Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, Google Sites, etc. In many regards the most important part of this pilot is to make sure your work is in a space that you can easily export and take with you when you are ready to move on. In this regard your domain becomes an online address that travels with you, making for a hub through which you manage your online personal, academic, and professional spaces.