Registering a Domain Name

The first step to creating your website is registering a domain name. A domain name is the address users will use to find your website (for example, www.yourname.com). You can choose to register your domain now, or wait until later, although we recommend if the domain you want is available that you register it as soon as possible to prevent losing it to someone else.

You can go through the entire learning/training process on LattePress without a domain name, it’s only necessary when you’re ready to launch your website. There are a couple situations where you may want to skip domain name registration:

• You’re just using LattePress as a learning tool and aren’t currently going to be bringing a website live you can skip this step and move on to hosting. You can go through the entire learning process using the staging URL provided by your hosting company. During the hosting tutorial, pay close attention to Pantheon as if this is your situation they can provide you with a free sandbox site to use while learning.
• You’re not sure what your domain name will be – in this case, you can skip it for now and we’ll cover it again during our launch tutorials.

If one of these situations apply to you, click the button below to skip this step and move on to setting up your staging environment. Otherwise, please review the video below then the text instructions beneath it to register your domain name with Gandi.

Registering a Domain Name with Gandi

There are a lot of registration services out there, but in our opinion the quickest and easiest to use and manage is Gandi. The reasons we recommend Gandi as our go-to domain registrar are:

• Great prices and regular discounts on registrations.
• Always has the latest .extensions available.
• Incredibly easy interface to updating nameservers and DNS information. If you’re unsure what this is, it’s the part most people have trouble with when it comes to domain names, and Gandi makes it incredibly easy.

We recommend registering all of your potential domains for your sites using the same domain registrar in order to simplify your life.

Registration is a fairly straight-forward process, if/when asked about DNS or nameservers, just choose the Gandi default for now as we’ll show you how to update this later. You do not need hosting from Gandi or an SSL certificate at this time, you only need a domain registration. If you have any troubles getting your domain name, contact Gandi support or post a thread in our forums.

To start, click on the button below to open Gandi in a new window. On this page, you’ll see a domain text input field where you can enter in the domain you’d like to register. Enter in your domain into the search field and hit enter or click the search button.

If it’s available, you’ll see something similar to the screenshot below.

If available, click on the shopping cart icon to add the domain to your shopping cart. This icon is highlighted below.

Once you’ve clicked the shopping cart icon, the domain order will be added to your cart, click on the “Checkout” button to proceed with the purchase.

You’ll then be brought to the order review. You can close out the option suggesting hosting, as we’ll get our website hosted with a different service. Agree to the terms and conditions shown (the T&C shown to you may be different depending on the domain you’ve chosen and your geographic location).

Once finished, click the “Checkout” button.

You may see this screen at some point during the process, if you do, click the “Create a free account” button or login depending on if you have an account created yet or not.

Once all the above is completed, select your payment method and proceed with the order. If at any point you are asked about your domains “DNS” or “Nameservers” – leave these set on whatever default option is offered. If you are offered an additional cost to keep your domain contact information private, this is optional and for most businesses is unnecessary.

Once you have completed checkout, Gandi will begin the domain name registration process. When registration is completed, you will be notified via e-mail from Gandi. For now, you can continue on with your tutorials. We won’t need to do anything with our registered domain name until near the end of the learning process when we launch our completed website. Click the button below to move on to the next step, setting up a staging environment.