The benefits of a Domain Name are that it enables you to have an identifiable and easily remembered web address such as "www.yourname.co.uk" or "www.yourproduct.co.uk" and e-mail addressed to that address such as "enquiries@yourname.co.uk". Also having your own Domain Name, means that you have full access to your web site if you wish to design and put up your own site.

Click on HERE to go to Claranet's Domain Name checking service, then hit the little cross on the top right of the page when you have finished to return here. If you read the page that comes up, it will tell you all about the various extensions that are available to different types of organisation, but remember, that while Claranet are trying to sell Domain Names, you still have an equal opportunity of getting your pages found by having them hosted by us as you will see in one of the later questions. The Domain Name search facility is at the bottom of the page.

After you have purchased your Domain Name, you will need to purchase commercial web space, and you will need an Internet Service Provider to host you site. A Domain Name is no use without these two additional items, and unfortunately there are some people that will register your Domain Name for you at little or no cost, then charge much higher prices for the other two items. Whatever the cost of the Domain Name, the package of three items is likely to cost anywhere between £120 and £200 according to which Service provider you go to, and what services they are offering.

You need to ask a service provider whether they offer "Front Page Extensions" if you are going to use such a package to design your web pages, and in any case you will need to ask whether they support the particular web design program that you will be using.

If you want a Form on your site for people to send you enquiries, or page counters, data download, or other facilities, then you will need to ask whether they provide a programing language called php or perl script.

If you want to have on-line shopping, and take credit card details, you will have to determine whether your site can be hosted on a Secure Server so that peoples private card details will not be compromised. This extra facility may cost anything up to an extra £150 or so.

You will need to ask what technical support they offer, at what times of the day or night it is available, and at what cost. What backup facilities the Service Provider has to protect your site, and what down time has been experienced over the last twelve months or so preventing potential customers from getting at your site. Always useful to do a Google search on: problems webhostname. As always, you will find that cheapest is often far from the best.

Some Web Site design companies such as this one, will host your pages for you without you having to purchase a Domain Name, commercial web space, or a Service Providers hosting fee, and they will make a small annual charge for hosting your pages. Here, for instance, we charge £25 per year for this service.

Your web address in this case would be "www.ldb.co.uk/yourname.htm" and there is no restriction in this case as to what names are available other than good taste and not repeating anyone else's name, Oh and you can't have one called .../sam, because that's the name of my rabbit.

No. It doesn't make a scrap of difference to your ranking with Search Engines whether your web address is "www.yourname.co.uk" or "www.ldb.co.uk/yourname.htm".

What is far more important is that the pages are designed to be as 'Index Ready' as possible to enable someone searching for your company name, or your product or sevice, to find you.

Just ring us up - Tel: 01543 254494, or e-mail to tonyc@ldb.co.uk, and we can discuss what name you would like for your web page, what information you want on it, supply us with whatever photographs you want to use, and you are ready to go, because we will look after all the page design, graphics, scanning, forms, animations etc.

If you want your own Domain name, we can sort that out for you too, otherwise we can host the site for you.

We have a separate page with all this information on. Press: HERE and check it out, then hit the 'Back button' and return to this page.

If we are hosting your site for you, you can have a front page started within half a day, and be able to see it for yourself at the address agreed. Further work will then be done on the page as soon as we receive data from you in the form of pictures, a history of your company, marketing information about your products and what their unique selling points are, and we shall then set out the layout of the site according to the spread of your product range and your budget constraints.

If you have elected to have your own domain registered, that will take a couple of days or so to set up, but we shall still set up a front page within the timescale above in order to set you on your way to your own presence on the web.

The total time to complete your site will be constrained by the time it takes you to provide information which we can work with, and therefore while the answer to the overall question is - how long is a piece of string, bear in mind that you hold the scissors.

At the bottom of the Domain Index page there is a section on Web Design, and you will see a link to Statistics. If you visit this page, you will find that we provide each site with a hit counter on the Home page of that site, which is a free service which we offer. After your site has been indexed you will be able to see for yourself whenever you want, month by month - how many hits you have had. Indexing by the search engines takes anything from three hours, up to six weeks, so things will start slowly and build up over a three month period. After that time, we take a view of how successful we deem your site, and if we are disatisfied, we re-index for you.

If you want each page of your site counted, we can do that too, so you know which pages are being viewed the most, but we have to make a charge for the additional counter scripts, but for a typical example of this, see the Ref:'Car' on the statistics page, and you will see how this can be done.

This section is applicable to ClaraNet clients only, but if you have a ClaraNet commercial website, then read on.

Open Outlook Express, or if you are using another email client, then what follows will probably hold true anyway, then follow:

1. Click on Tools in the top selection bar
2. From the dropdown, select Account
3. On the Internet Options box, click Mail if it is not already open
4. On the right hand side of the mail box, select Add
5. Select Mail
6. From the wizard that opens, you may be asked to put in your Name, Next
7. Put in the email address that you want to use - anything@yourdomain.co.uk, Next
8. E-Mail server names: Incoming mail server is POP3 from the selection box
9. Incoming mail server is: pop.yourdomain.co.uk
10. Outgoing mail server is: relay.yourdomain.co.uk - see note below, Next
11. Internet mail logon: enter the user name and password given to you by your ClaraNet agent
12. Tick the remember password box, Next, Finish
13. Not quite. Now go back to 3 above, click on your new email account to highlight it, then click on Set as default on the right hand side. Now you are done.

NOTE: The outgoing mail server detail as given is for Claranet dial-up or ClaraNet broadband users. If you use a different dial-up or broadband account, you will need to speak to them, and they will advise what to use for outgoing mail, otherwise you will be able to receive mail, but not send it. Chances are, that if you look in your current email account, for aol for example, the outgoing mail server definition will be exactly as you are using at the moment. Try that before you try to contact them, as getting in touch with other ISP's can sometimes be a 'pain in the neck', as well as being a chargeable event as often as not.

If you need further email support, you can ring ClaraNet email support on: 0845 234 0711. There is no charge for this call other that the bt charge for a local dial-up call.