Welcome to Your Virtual Store Front Training at the Gates of Gotham University. We hope you’ll find this module to be informative and help you take your business to the next level the DIY way!

In this module, we will cover buying your domain, setting up your domain and getting it setup to sell your product or service. So let’s get right to it!

Your Virtual Store front is what’s called an Internet domain name. This is the unique name that appears after the @ sign in email addresses, and after www. in web addresses. It typically takes the form of your organization's name and a standard Internet suffix, such as yourbusiness.com or stateuniversity.edu. You can use a domain name that you already own. Or you can purchase a domain from a service like www.godaddy.com, www.hostgator.com or any other domain purchasing service.

In checking the availability of your desired domain name, go to the search bar and type in the name and click Go.

If you happen to see a bid for your domain or a price that’s more than $40, its best to choose another name. This is a sign that your domain has already been purchased by a reseller and you have to purchase it at a their price.

.com, .org, .us, .ca, .co, .net - different fees

We suggest you pick a .com because it's what most people will type as a habit. 

Now, you have a domain but you don't have a website. The next step is creating a website for people to view and there are many platforms you can use for this.

* When you purchase a domain from Godaddy in the checkout process they'll offer you tons of offers and upgrades. We suggest skipping everything and go straight to the checkout for the domain.

The most popular website platform to use is called Wordpress. The organization has many templates. It’s also very easy to use. You have two choices with Wordpress.

Wordpress.org or a hosted Wordpress domain

Hosting (also known as website hosting or Web hosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more websites. In a sense, you rent space on a computer to hold your website. Your host, the computer where your website files are stored, assigns an address (DNS) for your files to your domain name so that anyone can find your website on the Internet by typing in your domain name.

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it's probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.

You can set up your domain on WP it is extremely simple and have it up and running.