Clover

We understand that a lot of church plants and new ministries haven't even thought through the need of actually purchasing a website address. This process is very easy to do, and is an essential part of your branding as a ministry.

We thought it would be helpful for us to give you some tips in choosing a web address. We've seen too many ministries and businesses make mistakes while choosing their domain name. Here are some tips when choosing your website address:


1. Make sure it's as short as possible:

A lot of ministries want to put their whole name in their address such as www.theemergingchurchofthegreaterlosangelesarea.com. Although that address is probably available, it's probably not a great fit for a couple of reasons. 1) The longer your domain name is, the higher the chance of people misspelling it. 2) The longer your domain name is, the higher the chance of people forgetting it. Plus, think of having an email address with that tacked on the end... Your friends won't want to email you anymore.


2. Hyphens are not a great solution:

If your church is named Cornerstone Church, you will probably find that www.cornerstonechurch.com was taken 10 years ago. A common solution for some people is to add a hyphen, and make it www.cornerstone-church.com. Although it might seem like an easy solution, don't do it. First of all, most people will type your address in without a hyphen the first time. This is not ideal on any sort of marketing level. Secondly, whenever you tell someone your web address or email address, you'll have to say "www dot cornerstone hyphen church". If you can help it, try not to use a hyphen.


3. Choose a name people can spell:

With the latest fad of naming churches Greek or Latin words comes obvious spelling issues when people are trying to find your church online. For example, one of our sites is called "Pshuche", which means soul in Greek. It's actually pronounced "Soo-Kay". If our church was named Pshuche, we probably could get www.pschuche.com, but no one would now how to get there unless they saw it written somewhere. Imagine telling someone your site address is www.pshuche.com... You would have to spell it every time. So, try to choose names for your site that everyone can spell. If for some reason your church is named something like Pshuche that is hard to spell, just make sure you have business cards with you to give to people so you're not stuck spelling it out every time.


4. .net, .biz, .tv, are not great solutions:

Again, if your church is named Cornerstone, it will probably be hard to find a short website address with Cornerstone Church in it. Resist the temptation of choosing a catchier name with anything other than .com or .org after it. Most people will go to the .com version of your name automatically.


5. If you find a name you like, snatch up the .com and .org versions:

This is just a good rule of thumb. You can have your preferred address as your main site, and have the other address(es) point to your site. It's probably around an additional $10 a year, but this ensures that no one else takes a similar domain and potentially confuses your audience. It's probably good to grab .net also if it is available. If you're curious how to bounce the names to the address you want, give us a call and we'll walk you through it. It's really easy.



Purchasing your website address:

This process is very easy, and most companies will have an obvious way to purchase your domain. We encourage people to use Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com) to purchase their web address. Once you go to Go Daddy's website, you'll see at the very top of the site an easy search box to find which addresses are available.

As you go through this process, here are some things to remember:

1. Don't buy anything else: They are going to offer you tons of different things before you finally check out. Just stay strong- although it would be cool to have a domain with .mobi, and .info at the end, you don't need it.


2. Make sure you choose "Private Registration": This simply ensures that you don't get a bunch of spam to your address.


3. Save all of your info (Username, Password, etc): You will need to be able to sign back into your Go Daddy account so you can point this website address to your Clover site.


4. If you bought your web address after your Clover site, call us at 805-527-8900. We need to have your web address in our system or else your site won't work. (If you gave us the address when you purchased your Clover site, then you're good).


Now that you have your web address, you're ready to set up your email. If you'd like a walkthrough on that, read our help article on Setting Up Your Email.

If you don't need to set up new email, you can skip straight to Launching Your New Site.