A crash course on domain settings

Let’s dive into a crash course on all things domains.

Boring? Maybe. Likely to be useful to you at some point down the road? Definitely!

First, what’s a domain?

A domain is a fancy name for your URL—or the link to the homepage of your website. It’s also what your custom emails would live on. Ex: churchname.com, principal@schoolname.com

Domains typically cost between $20 and $40 per year to maintain ownership. Pretty cheap. For this reason, people will commonly buy the .com, .org, and .net versions of their domain in case someone mistypes the URL.

Fun fact: Some people (called domain flippers) will buy random domains and resell them for a profit, which is only legal sometimes. 🤣

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Cool, then what’s a subdomain?

A subdomain is a new link you can create by adding characters to the beginning of your root domain, separated by a dot (ex: preschool.churchname.com or give.churchname.com).

You can usually set up as many of these as you want for free with your domain.

These can point to a separate site you have created OR redirect to a different place entirely.

Ex: preschool.churchname.com takes people to your preschool site. Now, instead of having to buy preschoolname.com, you created a whole new website for free under the churchname.com umbrella. Yeah, you only saved $20/year, but hey, it’s something—AND you’ve maintained brand consistency within your church.

You can also do this with locations. Instead of buying my husband’s church its own domain, for example, I set up oakley.beautiful-savior.com, because it’s a multi-site ministry, with a location in Fairfield and Oakley.

Or: give.churchname.com redirects people to your Tithe.ly or VANCO page. Now, instead of telling people to go to tithe.ly/[insert random string of numbers and letters here], you can just say “go to give.churchname.com,” which is much friendlier on the human brain.

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What’s the difference between that and churchname.com/preschool or churchname.com/give?

Anything that’s located after the domain, after a slash (/) is called a path.

When you add a path that’s located at churchname.com/_____, it has to live on churchname.com; whereas a subdomain can point to a different site.

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What are DNS records?

DNS records are settings that tell the robots in the atmosphere where to take someone when they type in your URL or send you an email.

I’ll cover the 3 most-commonly-tinkered-with DNS records (a.k.a. settings):

A Records

These are the simplest ones, telling the robots in the sky to transport someone to your site’s IP address when they type in churchname.com.

CNAME Records

These direct your subdomains. If you want to create preschool.churchname.com, you’ll need to add a CNAME record called “preschool” to your DNS.

If you want someone to be able to type in www.churchname.com and land on your site, technically, the “www” requires its own CNAME record.

A more practical application: You also set up redirects using a simple CNAME record. Ex: Use a CNAME to create give.churchname.com, then tell it to redirect to your Tithe.ly or VANCO page.

MX Records

*Cue Blues Clues mail time song*

These settings direct all things mail. They look like gobbledygook, but, if they’re plugged in correctly, mail will magically land in your inbox.

PS: You don’t have to write the gobbledygook; Gmail or Outlook will give you a chunk of weirdness to simply copy/paste into your settings.

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Anything else I should know?

When choosing your domain, try to keep it short, sweet, and memorable. If possible, try to avoid any dashes, dots, or consecutive repeated characters. If possible, try to include the name of your city or neighborhood.

Want to set up a give.churchname.com redirect? If you give it a try and need help, shoot me an email!