Build Your Place in Cyberspace

The debate is over. It's no longer a question of whether you should build a Web site. It's a question of when. From eighth-graders to Wall Street analysts, it seems that almost everyone is scrambling to stake a claim in cyberspace. Having reviewed more Web sites over the past five years than I can count, I recently decided it was about time that I homestead a piece of the Web for myself.

I couldn't spend months building my site - I needed to get it up and running as quickly as possible. Fortunately, there are at least a half-dozen software packages that will not only help you lay out a site within a few hours but also generate the arcane code needed to create it.

But there's more to creating a Web site than simply designing the pages. In fact, it turned out to be a 10-step process. You need to create a memorable domain name. You need to find a reliable Internet hosting service. And you need to do something that thousands of Webmeisters have failed to do: figure out why people would want to visit your site in the first place.

Step 1: Sketch out a blueprint.

Before I cracked the Web-page software, I reminded myself that I wasn't building a site for myself: I was building a site for the millions of cybersurfers who might visit it - and for the few who actually would.

"Think about your audience," advised Mohanbir Sawhney, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, whose personal Web site is now in its third generation. "People log onto the Web either to spend time or to save time. If the goal of your site is to help people save time, they shouldn't have to make 14 mouse clicks to get where they need to go."

Point taken. I couldn't sketch a decent blueprint for my site without thinking about who might visit it and what they might do there. My goal was to give readers and TV viewers access to an archive of my articles, along with a way to talk back to me. To make that goal clear, I decided to put a mission statement on my home page.

Visitors couldn't save time if my site were difficult to navigate, so I opted to give it an easily accessible layout and to include a search function on the home page to help them quickly locate articles. I also decided to get a Web address that's easy to remember - preferably one that includes the moniker I use on television, JQ.

Step 2: Be the master of your domain name.

Even if you haven't built your Web site yet, you should register your site's Internet address ASAP. If you wait much longer, chances are that someone else will claim the name that you want - if they haven't already done so. So that people can easily find your site, try to get a domain name that's memorable - one that matches your name or your company's name (as in yourname.com or companyname.com).

To claim my domain name, I needed to register with the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). That meant turning to the InterNIC, a cooperative venture of the National Science Foundation and a Herndon, Virginia-based company called Network Solutions Inc. The InterNIC oversees the registration of major Web addresses, including those bearing the suffixes .com, .org, and .net (these are known as "top-level domain names").

I dropped into the InterNIC site to see if jq.com was available. It wasn't. Hanna-Barbera, a division of Warner Brothers, had already reserved it for Jonny Quest, the science-fiction cartoon character. I checked jq.net, but that too was taken - by someone at Sexxxy.com (for what purpose, I dare not guess). Since I couldn't use my nickname, I searched for a reasonable facsimile of it. I discovered that j-q.com was available, and paid $70 to register that name with InterNIC. (The fee is good for two years; I'll pay $35 per year thereafter.)

A word of warning: Other sites may overcharge you. Make sure you go to www.internic.net, not www.internic.com, an "ambush URL" run by an outfit that will hit you with a $250 registration fee.

And a word of hope: The federal government will soon authorize as many as five new top-level domain names. That change will make possible the creation of billions of new domain names. You can find out about the status of this and other proposed changes to the DNS on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Web site.

Coordinates: InterNIC, www.internic.net; Network Solutions Inc., www.netsol.com; the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, www.ntia.doc.gov