Adding extra domain names isn’t something I’d ever done – until this past weekend. Typically domains are given to me or they come with the host. But my church wanted a name that was easier to read on a bumper sticker than firstuunashville.org. Plus they’re cheap, on the order of $9.00 each.

People had told me it was simple, but I knew enough about the complexity of the Domain Name System (DNS) to be skeptical. Turns out I was wrong. It’s dead easy. Here’s how.

Step 1. Choose a registrar. You want an ICANN-Accredited one. Geeky friends whom I trust seem to mostly use GoDaddy, so that’s where my co-chair of Communications and I went, with church credit card in hand.

Step 2. Choose the domain names you want. Chances are you’re not going to get your first choice, but the system spits back some alternatives. From that list we found a couple that were acceptable, if not ideal. We chose “fuunweb.com” and “fuunweb.org” because they are shorter, faster to type and easier to remember than the alternatives.

Step 3. Buy your extra domains. Preferably do this with the church credit card (assuming you are getting them for your church).

Step 4. Manage your new domains. We had to recover a bit after the ordeal of buying, but we returned, recharged by coffee. At this point if you’re like us, you will be overwhelmed by GoDaddy’s very busy screen. We signed in with our username and password, no problem. But then what? Eventually we figured out you should click on Domain Names / Manage Domains at far left of the horizontal menu above “Welcome.” This brings you to a list of your domains. Click on the domain name links (in our case fuunweb.com and fuunweb.org) and you have all kinds of possibilities.

Step 5. Set them up to forward. Assuming this is what you want to do with your new domains, just click on the forwarding link. Then “Enable” forwarding, enter where to forward it to and choose the type of redirect. You can also “Mask” your domain at this point.

Masking makes your new domain name act just like the domain it’s pointing to. So, if we had masked fuunweb.com, then www. fuunweb.com/about/ would look just like www.firstuunashville.org/about/. Unless you really need it, I’d advise against masking. It can hurt your search engine rankings.

Just click “OK,” and it’s done. However, given the way the DNS works you won’t see the results for probably about a day. If it’s not working in 3 days you’ve got a problem, but chances are all will be fine. The delay has to do with how the new name propagates (in a loose interpretation of the DNS) to computers around the world.

But that’s all there is to it. We’ve got our new domain names for bumper stickers and more. And if we can do it, so can you.