You could be forgiven for not knowing what domain names are. You use them every day, but it’s a technical term, and not one that you really need to do unless you plan to get one of your very own. Put simply, domain names are website addresses, although in reality it’s a little more complicated than that.

You see, a website address is made of more than just the domain name. First there’s the http:// (which means we’re using hypertext, the web), then the www (which means you’re using the web part of the site you’re on, not email or anything else). It’s the part just after that, including .com, .net and many other TLDs (top-level domains), that makes up the domain name.

So what does this mean? Well, google.com is a domain name. So is ebay.com. On the other hand, news.google.com (that’s Google news), isn’t a domain name – it’s a sub-domain, part of google.com. In the same way, google.com/about isn’t a domain name either – it’s just a section of Google’s website.

At this point, many people wonder what the .com thing is all about. To answer quickly, .com stands for ‘commercial’. Originally, the idea was to keep the for-profit part of the web separate from the rest, but the growth of web business has long since caused this idea to fall by the wayside.

If you want to start your own website, then one of the first things you want to do is register yourself a domain name. Once you’ve chosen one, you can make as many sub domains and sections within it as you like. Having your own domain name (as opposed to having your website in a section of someone else’s) makes people more likely to take your site seriously, both in a professional and a personal sense. It shows that your website isn’t just some fly-by-night operation, and it’s also likely to get you a higher ranking on search engine results pages.