The Domain Name Saga

Here are your options for using a domain name on the internet.

(I highly recommend web hosting at www.catalog.com.  It's the best.)

1. URL Frame.  URL Frame is an interesting option, but I don't like it.  Your web hosting or DNS company will toss up a HTML frame.  Your web site will appear INSIDE the frame.

Pros: www.yourdomain.com appears as the URL.

Cons: Search engines like Google do not like frames and it may affect your ranking.  Also the first page that serves up is index.html.  Say you have a link to page2.html.  You click it.  What appears in the URL?  www.yourdomain.com.  So if you hit refresh, it does not refresh page2.thml, but takes you back to index.html.  In a perfect world, it would show www.yourdomain.com/page2.html and there would be no refresh problem.

2. URL Redirect.  This option is not that good either.  Basically when you type in your domain name, you get your page, but the URL changes to www.geocities.com/yourYahooID/index.html.

Pros:  People can use your domain name to get to your site as in URL Frame.  Typically a domain name is more descriptive and easy to remember than the URL of your actual web hosting server.

Cons:  One of the whole purposes of a domain name is to HIDE the ugly long name of your web host.

3. Static IP.  This option is the most professional.  It is offered by the Geocities Pro package, but not in the Geocities Plus package.

Pros:  You always see your domain in the URL, even when you are in a subdirectory or different page.  (Unlike URL Frame).  For Example, www.yourdomain.com/happy/fun.html.  It hides the URL of your web hosting service.

Cons: It costs a little bit more.