Choosing the proper domain name is an art. A good one is easy to remember, reflects your brand, and inspires trust in people. A bad one can be confusing, hard to type into the address bar, or boring. I’ve purchased many a domain name over the years, and here are my most useful tips.

• Register for a “.com” address when you buy a domain name. If it’s not available in the name you want, choose another name that is available. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred times, people will add a “.com” to the end of your domain name when entering it in the address bar, expecting you to have a com name. It you buy a “.net” domain name or something else, they may not be able to find you. There are some legitimate times to choose other than .com, such as if you qualify as a government entity.
• Before buying the domain name, do an internet search for the name (minus the .com) and see if someone is already using it in another capacity. I usually also do an online search with the secretary of state in my state to see if someone else has claimed it as a business name in case I want to do so. The US Patent and Trademark Office is also helpful. If you see any conflicts with your potential domain name and you may want to check with an attorney if you still want to use that exact name. You don’t need a legal battle up the road.
• There are a couple of ways to go when choosing an actual name for your domain name registration. You can choose a cool, trendy name that can be memorable if you do enough brand marketing. It may or may not make it obvious what your site is actually about. The other road is to choose a name the makes it easy for someone to guess what your site is about, but also has something interesting or humorous about it. You can try adding a cool animal name or a color into your domain name. This can often work. I also look at lists of idioms or wise old sayings for inspiration, such as “from pillar to post” or “every dog has his day.” A variation on these can often work to inject humor or nostalgia into your name. Another tip is to search for brand-naming companies. You can look at their portfolio and see how they put words together for a name. Come up with a large list, because chances are that many of these names will be taken.
• Once you have a list of names that you like, do a search at a domain name seller. You can do that at Bluehost. Sometimes you register a domain name at your hosting company, or you can simply buy the domain name separately from the hosting. Be aware that your domain name purchase can move separately from your hosting, can stay with the original company or can be transferred (usually requiring a renewal fee.) Sometimes you can get a free domain name or cheap domain with a web hosting package. Bluehost, one of my favorite hosting companies, offers a free domain with hosting. Whichever way you go, be certain to choose a registrar accredited by InterNIC.
• When purchasing your domain name, be sure to look into purchasing ID Protect, Domain Privacy, or something similar, at the same time. This hides your name, address and email address from prying eyes. Otherwise, all of the data on you as owner/administrator of the site will be available online. One of the worst consequences of this is that your email address will be scraped by spambots and you will get an influx of spam.
• Once you find a domain name you like and it’s available, purchase it right away. You never know how soon it will disappear. The cost for domain registration is usually less than $10/year. You can sign up for multiple years for a cheaper rate, or sign up for auto-renew. I also add the renewal date to my calendar so I’m sure not to lose the name.

Once you purchase a domain name, you are on your way to having your own website. I usually like to create a header around my domain name as a first step to designing a site. You can hire a graphic designer for this or find a site that lets you generate your own logo. Pick colors and a feel that will set the tone for your whole website. Next step, purchasing hosting for your site. Here are my reviews for my favorite hosting companies.

It’s a grand and wonderful dream to have your own website online. Perhaps you yearn to kick your business up to the next level, look established in the eyes of customers, and disseminate information easily without having to pick up the phone. Or perhaps you have a great organization that has to get the word out or just want to put up a personal site to tell the world what you’ve been up to. So where to start? I’m going to give you the big picture broken down into basic steps to get your website online.

• Choose and purchase a domain name – There’s a lot to choosing the correct domain name. This should be done before you even start creating your site. See my Secrets of Choosing a Domain Name.
• Find Hosting – Your website will consist of files and images that will be called up when your visitors come to your site. The files have to reside somewhere, basically on servers or giant versions of your home computer. Web hosting is basically paying a monthly fee to have those files stored on someone’s servers so that your visitors can see the files and images when they get to your site. Finding good web hosting is a challenge, especially for someone new to the game. Read my reviews of my two favorite hosting companies.
• Create Your Website – If you are a do-it-your-selfer, you can learn HTML and CSS to create a site. There are also What You See Is What You Get (WYSWYG) programs that will help you create your site without knowing a ton of code, but you will still need to know some basics. You can also find sites on the web that allow you to choose a website template and customize it, without knowing anything about web design. The most costly option, but one that will generate the best results, is to find a local web design firm to create your site.
• Upload Your Site – After your site is created, the files must be uploaded to your web host. This is usually done through an File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. My favorite is FileZilla, a free FTP program.

Once your site goes live, you may have visions of hundreds or thousands of visitors each day. However, one important thing to know is that if you build it, they will not come. You have to work very hard to get visitors to come to your site, but that is a huge topic for another day.

My next post in this series covers the Secrets to Choosing a Domain Name.

Back to our head-to-head, toe-to-toe fight between two of the best photo organizing software programs, Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows and Picasa. We had a pretty even matchup in part one, each program with different strengths.

• Prints and Creations: The winner is Photoshop Elements for its superior tools in this area. Picasa and Photoshop Elements both allow you to order prints of your photos from a variety of photo-printing sites. Photoshop Elements has much more robust tools within the software for organizing and creating photo products such as photo books, calendars, cards and t-shirt transfers. They also have many tools to help you print your photos at home in a variety of print formats. Elements also allows you to save your photobooks as a PDF, which is a nice format for saving and sharing.
• Emailing: We have a tie for this round. If you like cute stationary and nice PDF files, Elements is your winner. If you like social networking, Picasa may be your better choice. Both Picasa and Elements allow you to send photos by email, attached or embedded. Both allow you to compress photos to a smaller file size for easier emailing. With Picasa, you can create galleries and share the link with only those you invite. As for social networking, Facebook, SmugMug and Flickr all have Picasa plugins. With Photoshop Elements, you can place your photo into a variety of stationary themes, borders, and backgrounds of your choosing. You can also create a PDF slideshow of your pictures to email to your family and friends.
• Video: Pretty evenly matched in this area, for the basics. However, if you pay more and get the Adobe Elements package with the added video editing software, called Photoshop Premiere Elements, then Elements wins. Picasa does allow you to combine photos and videos into a movie of your own creation. You can then upload your video to YouTube with a click. Photoshop Elements alone allows gives you a lot of editing capabilities in creating slideshows set to music.
• Privacy: Photoshop Elements is for your desktop, so any files stored there are as secure as your computer. If you opt to use Photoshop.com for online storage, you can keep your albums private or public with a click on a lock button. You can also have friends with whom you share your albums. You can elect to have an email sent automatically to your friends whenever you update and album, which is a cool feature for those who are trying to keep friends and family updated with their latest photos. With Picasa Web Albums you can pick from three album visibility options: public, unlisted (hard to guess web address), and sign-in required to view.
• Extras – Photoshop Elements wins for coolest additional features:
  Photoshop Elements:
  a) Photomerge group shot – combine the best photo of each person in group shots into a single photo. Great when you can’t get the whole family smiling in a single photo.
  b) Photomerge scene cleaner – Say you’ve taken a series of shots, but when your subjects looked their best, but a car was intruding in the background. You can wipe away that annoying car with this feature.
  c) Map Your Memories – like Picasa, in Elements you can tag your pictures with a location and view them on a map.
  d) Online Adobe Flash creations with great animated templates like maps.
  e) Create PDF – easily create a PDF of your Photo book for an easy format to email or save.
  f) Save for Web feature – Elements allows you to easily compress photos that you wish to upload to the web. This is a great feature in the full version of Photoshop, and it’s available in Elements now as well. Elements also allows you to convert files to many different photo formats.
• Picasa:
  a) Put your images on a map with Google Maps, and/or geotag them to Google Earth, My Places. You can set your Privacy settings so that others cannot see the location of your photos.
  b) For blog or webpage use, you can create and embed a Flash slideshow.
  c) You may have seen the commercials for Apple’s ILife about facial recognition. This just blew me away. I think we’ve surpassed the age of the Jetsons, in a lot of ways. Picasa also has facial recognition. When on the web version of Picasa, you can enable Name Tags and Picasa will try to find similar faces in your album. Note that when using naming tags, you can control who can see the name tags, especially important in the case of children.

In conclusion,  Photoshop Elements 7 is the winner here with more advanced tools, great features and a great interface.  So if you want to invest a bit of money and get more powerful editing and lots of cool features, then spend the money for Photoshop Elements and use it in combination with the online storage of Photoshop.com. However, if you just want the basics, free software, are a Google fan, and live for social networking, choose the Picasa photo-organizing software. You will have basic tools for photo organizing, editing and sharing.

Back to part one of our series on Photoshop Elements vs. Picasa.

Photoshop Elements 7
Picasa

Do You Know Which Photo Organizing Software is Better for Your Needs?

In the ultimate showdown of two of the best photo organizing software programs available, we’ve done a side-by-side comparison of all of the important features in order to determine a winner.

In one corner, we have Google’s Picasa for the desktop and Picasa Web Albums, that work in conjunction with each other. In the other corner we have Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows, a robust photo organizing tools with many of the features of the award-winning Photoshop. Elements works in conjunction with Photoshop.com for online storage. Here’s our take on each of the features.

• Online storage Purely looking at online storage prices, Adobe offers you more for your money. The online companion to Photoshop Elements called Photoshop.com offers 2GB of free storage space, enough for 8,000 wallpaper size photos. You can get this membership without purchasing Photoshop Elements. Picasa offers 1GB of storage for free. If you need 10GB of storage (up to 7,000 photos), the prices are comparable at about $20/year between Picasa and Photoshop.com. At 40GB of storage, Photoshop.com is the winner at $39.99/year, as opposed to $75/year on Picasa. Photoshop.com has a 100GB storage limit. On Picasa, you can purchase up to 400GB of storage, a huge amount of space probably only needed by professional photographers.
• Price:Picasa is the winner here, if you just want the basics. You can’t beat its free price that includes1GB of storage. In order to get all of the features described in this article, you must pay the $139.99 price tag for Photoshop Elements. However, the basic membership to Photoshop.com is free and includes 2GB of storage.
• Mac vs. PC: The winner is Photoshop Elements (version 6 for Mac). Adobe products are big favorites of graphic and web designers who more often than not are on a Mac. Photoshop Elements works well on a Mac. On the other hand, the launch of Picasa for Mac was in January 2009, so it’s a newbie to in the Mac world. Picasa is supposed to work well with iPhoto for mac, but is missing some features in Picasa for Windows.
• Desktop organizing and sorting: Elements is the winner here, by a nose. The interface is nicer and it has a great tagging system that allows you to make cool “creations” with your photos.  With Elements, you import photos and they are automatically stored by date. You can then easily tag photos by person, place or event.
• Editing The clear winner here is Photoshop Elements. If you want the best and most powerful photo editing tools in your photo organizing software, its the way to go. Elements, being in the Adobe family, has many of the same tools as one of the most powerful photo editing software, it’s big brother, Photoshop. The only drawback is that there is a learning curve for using the tools in Adobe Elements, although they do have one-step shortcuts. Picasa’s tools may not be as powerful, but it does have many editing tools that are sufficient for your average amateur photographer, including red-eye, cropping and one-click fixes for color and contrast. Note that the free Basic membership to Photoshop.com also comes with photo editing tools, more comparable to Picasa’s tools.

Stay tuned for our Photoshop Elements vs. Picasa, Part 2, which includes Sharing, Printing, Videos, Extras and our conclusion.

Photoshop Elements 7
Picasa

Speed, speed, speed. We’re all searching for it – from Internet connections to fast cars and productivity tools. Therefore, when our computer that we so rely on to get things done, slows to a glacial pace, we need a solution. My husband, with the benefit of a first-rate IT department and backup system, has his laptop completely wiped about every six months, and then the software reinstalled. For those of us who aren’t so lucky, you need solutions. First, realize that there are a variety of reasons that your computer may be slow. And there are a variety of fixes.

• Problem 1: Your hard drive is too full to run smoothly. It needs about 300 – 500 MBs or more of free space to speed up your computer.
  Solution: Go to the start menu and select “My Computer” or “Computer” option. Check how much free space you have available on your C drive. If you don’t have enough free space, try to delete some old files you don’t need. Either move them to a backup device or delete them completely. Photos and videos are big memory hogs. Consider being a good photo editor and delete any and all photos that you wouldn’t put into an album.
• Problem 2: You may have unwanted or redundant items in your Windows registry.
  Solution: Use a good registry cleaner to remove configuration data that is no longer wanted or in use on your PC. Click here to see my reviews of the best cleaners.
• Problem 3:You have a defragmented hard drive that is causing your computer to be running slow.
  Solution:Run the defragmenting program on your computer. First, close all programs. Then open the defragmenting program. Look for it in Programs/Accessories/System Tools/ Disk Defragmenting.
• Problem 4:Your computer is running too many programs at once. You may not realize how many programs you have open. Those running in the background may be slowing down the program you would like to use. Programs like Photoshop are notorious for slowing down your computer.
  Solution: Hit the Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys at the same time. This will bring up your Task Manager and Show you all programs that are currently running. End any programs you aren’t using. You can also close all programs, shut down your PC, and then restart.
• Problem 5: Your computer could be full of adware, spyware, viruses or Trojans. Any and all of these malicious programs could affect your computer speed.
  Solution: Be certain to have updated firewall, antivirus, and spyware removal programs. These are three separate programs, and all are necessary to keep your computer running at top speed.

Following these steps, you can once again have lightning quick speed, at least in one area of your life.