Dot-com minds share their Web wisdom

When the economy gets weird, the weird turn pro and the truly weird flock straight to the Internet.

“It’s an interesting time,” said Barb Rechterman, executive vice president of GoDaddy.com, a national company that provides Web hosting and other services for dot-com businesses. “It’s a perfect time to get online and put a presence out there, whether it’s a business or a resume. The whole job market is moving to a more online market and people are looking at creating their own Web sites just to get their resume and names out there.”

Growth amid decline

Ms. Rechterman and other members of the Go Daddy staff were in town this past weekend for a wedding and stopped at Shenandoah Joe’s Ivy Road location on Friday for a bit of a stimulant. She noted that Go Daddy, which specializes in putting people online, has seen growth even while the economy crumbled like an old chocolate chip cookie.

“I think a lot of people are looking at an Internet presence because they’re concerned that they may lose their job or they’ve lost their job and are trying something new,” she said. “There are still a lot of people who are setting up sites that are for hobbies, but even those people are looking at their sites for income potential.”

Starting up a site can be confusing, with the first issue often being finding a name.

“People often say there are no good domain names left, but the names are only limited by creativity,” Ms. Rechterman said. “When we came up with Go Daddy, we took the little button from [America Online] that said ‘go.’ We were looking for things to go with ‘Daddy’ and when we came up with Go Daddy, it just sounded right.”

Although Go Daddy had nothing to do with the business of setting up Internet sites, it was a great name and easily remembered.

“We started playing with names and it didn’t really matter if there wasn’t a direct connection,” she said. “Google really didn’t mean anything until Google was created.”

Online wannabes would be wise to play with names, Ms. Rechterman said. Then they need to purchase the domain name and protect it, buying the various suffixes such as .org, .com, .this and .that that might allow competitors to sneak sales by squeaking in on coattails.

Buy them up

“Some people will buy domain names that include plurals as well, just to make sure they have protected themselves,” she said. “For one domain name, people need to consider buying several different versions just to eliminate confusion with other sites, whether those sites are up now, or not.”

Next is designing the Web site. There are several pieces of software that provide templates and make setting up a site pretty easy. There are also companies, including Go Daddy and Charlottesville’s Blue Ridge Internetworks, that will help design it, for a price.

“You need to make sure you plan things out and sit down and decide what you want, what your visitors are going to need,” Ms. Rechterman said. “The idea is to really think about it. There are ways to make a Web site unique and that’s what you want to do, whether it’s just for fun or profit.”