Head Back to School with the Right Domain

Summer flew by, didn’t it?

With school about to be back in session, it’s a time for thinking about homework, school supplies, extracurricular clubs, careers, and the future. 

Odds are you’ll have a need to create a website during this school year. Maybe it’s for a school project, or to stand out by highlighting your skills to colleges or employers.

Let’s look at how you can choose appropriate domains to help you achieve your academic and career goals.

Choose the Right Domain

Choosing a domain name for a student project or to host your resume is different from choosing a domain name to start a business.

Here are a few tips for students:

1. While businesses generally want a .com domain, students should get creative. There are hundreds of domain extensions other than .com, and many of them have good domains available for registration.
2. When choosing a domain for a personal website, think about using a combination like firstname.extension or firstnamelastname.extension. The latter will usually be available in domains other than .com (unless your name is very common!). You can also use superlatives such as best and great.
3. You don’t have to spend a lot on a domain name. Especially if it’s for a class project or some other short-term use, consider a domain with a low first-year registration price. Namecheap offers some domains for less than $2 for the first year.

In addition to these general tips, let’s explore ways that students can advance their future by creating a website. 

High School Students

You’re busy juggling homework, extracurriculars, a part-time job, and applying to college. To get into your dream school, you need to stand out from your competition. Leverage your hard work to get into a great college by creating a personal website. 

• Highlight your expertise for colleges. Create a website about your expertise. Are you a photographer? A designer? An actress? Make a website about you that you can share with colleges or scholarship committees

You can pick a domain that helps you stand out, too. Domains specific to an expertise include .design, .photography, and .actor. Or, for a general domain, consider .me or .bio.

• Show off your sports highlight reel. Hoping to land a sports scholarship? Then you probably have a highlight reel. Pointing a school to search for your videos on YouTube is OK, but why not register an easy-to-use domain name that forwards to your YouTube videos? That will look much more impressive, and will allow you to include other information about yourself.

There are lots of sports domains available including .football, .soccer, .futbol, .rodeo, .tennis, and .hockey. With free forwarding, it’s simple to register one of these domains and forward it to your YouTube page. Potential coaches will be impressed by your domain, too.

• Set up a blog. Blogs are a good way to show a college that you are an expert at something or to otherwise highlight who you are. You can use just about any domain you want and connect it to WordPress. A good domain choice is .blog.

• School organizations needs websites too. In addition to creating a website to showcase yourself, you’ll probably have an opportunity to create a site for a class project or school club. For the latter, how about a .club domain?

College Students (and Beyond)

You got into the college of your dreams (OK, maybe your backup school). Now you’re a little fish in a pool way bigger than high school and you need to stand out.

Here are some ideas to help.

• Create a website on a free .me domain. Namecheap offers a free one-year .me domain registration plus other benefits to university students. So far, Namecheap has given away 200,000 .me registrations! A .me website is perfect for highlighting who you are to potential employers and grad schools.

• Show off your expertise. When you graduate, you’ll be competing against hundreds of thousands of people for the best jobs. Create a website about your expertise and use a specific domain. Choose from .finance, .engineer, .accountant, or .marketing if you want to get a job in those fields. Or choose the more generic .expert extension.

• Create an online portfolio. Art students, photographers, architects, and journalism majors should show off their work with an online portfolio. The Namecheap .me free domain comes with a free photo website for a year. You can also choose domains such as .design, .photography or .press.

• Start a blog. This is one of the easiest ways to showcase who you are in a thoughtful way. You can get across much more in a blog than in a 30-minute job interview. Start a blog on .blog or another relevant domain.

• An advanced domain for an advanced degree. If you’re earning your MBA, what about getting a .MBA domain? At some point, you might even get a .PhD domain. Google will operate the .PhD domain but hasn’t announced a launch date yet.

College and graduate students might want to print business cards that include their website domain name and handing them out to job recruiters.

Get Online

Some people worry about creating a website because they think it’s hard to do. While it used to require some technical chops, creating a website is much easier today.

EasyWP, managed WordPress hosting from Namecheap, is super easy to use. It’s a great platform for building a site.

And you might not even need to create a website. How about registering a memorable domain and forwarding it to your LinkedIn profile?

Take the next step toward your future. Register a domain and start a website today!