I’m going to assume you want to make a good guild website. Having a proper (top-level) domain name instantly gives you more credibility than guild with a domain such as lame.free.somefreehost.com/guildname - also, you can get a .com domain name for under $9, so there is no excuse to not get one if you plan to promote your guild.

There are  literally hundreds of places to register domain names, but to make this easier on everyone (and myself) I’m going to say use namecheap.com, this is where I have my main domain names as their control panel is very easy to use and registering domains is very quick.

The process is fairly simple. Make an account at namecheap.com, add funds to your account (there are plenty of payment methods - PayPal, credit cards, Google checkout…) and then enter the domain name you want. If the domain name you want is available you just follow the wizard, if not then keep searching! I’m not going to go into those specifics as that’s what their help/support section is for.

Some tips…

• Keep it simple. If possible just register YOURGUILDNAME.com to make remembering your guild website easier. Avoid using numbers, hyphens and exta letters that aren’t relevant to your guild’s name.
• Register the .com if you can. If not, try to register the domain specific to your country (eg, if you have a UK guild then .co.uk would be a good choice).
• Avoid hyphens in your domain name if possible as it opens up more room for error when people try to find your site.
• Use coupons! Search in Google for “namecheap + CURRENT MONTH + CURRENT YEAR”, this should give you a bunch of results for valid coupons (there is a different one each month). You only save like a dollar, but for typing in a single word it’s worth it.

Domain registration length

If you’d like to increase your rank in Google for search terms (such as “Warhammer Online Guild”) then consider registering your domain name for 10 years (the maximum registration time allowed). It is believed that Google looks at these sites as more likely to be reliable as spammers would rarely register a domain for more than a year. There is also the added benefit of not having to worry about renewing your domain name for the next 10 years.

If you don’t want to pay…

There is no rule that you need a top-level domain name, but if you’re going to get a free sub-domain name at least get one that is respectable. Consider registering a blog at Wordpress.com so your URL will be “guildname.wordpress.com” - it’s always best to have your guild name at the start of the URL as it will help people remember it and in my opinion looks much better.

I’m constantly brainstorming new feature and article ideas (and all that good stuff) to make Warhammer Gamers stand out, and get a larger reader base. Seeing as guilds are such a huge aspect of WAR, plenty of people will be wanting to make their own guild websites, so I thought, why not make a tutorial series on how to build your own guild website?

I won’t just be going through "how to do HTML", that’ll just be one, or maybe a couple of articles. I’ll be focusing on all the aspects of website creation such as getting a domain name, hosting your website, what you should include on it, creating an application form - all that good stuff. I want it to be THE guide people go to when building a website for their guild.

There is no doubt similar guides are out there on the web but I think I can offer a different take on the process, and hopefully specialize some aspects in terms of WAR (such as making an guild application form that is relevant to WAR’s game play).

I’ll get to work on writing the series in a couple of hours and will try to have one up on the site every 2-3 of days for the next couple of weeks or so (I’ll continue writing related articles after that but it’ll just be a little slower).