In the AI era, building a personal brand starts with choosing a good website and a high-quality registrar
*▲Building a personal brand starts with a good website. *
The AI era is here, and Vibe Coding has lowered the threshold for setting up a website to a record low.
In the past, to make a personal website, you had to learn HTML, CSS, and maybe a little JavaScript. It would take several months just to get the picture out of your head. Now it’s different – you can have your website online in just one weekend. I wrote “Build a personal website from scratch using Vibe Coding” a while ago, and it was about this change: you no longer need to learn grammar, you only need to learn to express the pictures in your mind clearly.
But every time after teaching Vibe Coding, I would be stuck with the same question: “Teacher, my website is ready, how do I choose a domain? Where should I buy it?”
This problem may not seem like a big deal, but it may haunt you for years. Purchasing a domain name is not a throwaway decision, it is the long-term house number of your personal brand. If you pick the wrong one, it will be troublesome to move in the future; if you pick the right one, it will still be working for you ten years later.
Therefore, today I want to write an article to fully explain how to choose a domain name registrar.
Five principles for choosing a good domain
1. Simple and easy to remember
The shorter the better, easy to spell, easy to remember, and easy to share.
If your domain name takes 30 seconds to spell to a friend, it’s a design failure. My private test is: in a coffee shop, separated by a table, read it to the other party once and see if the other party can input it correctly? If you can, congratulations on passing the test.
2. Topic related
Simply put, the domain name should be related to your brand or area of expertise. In this way, clear value can be conveyed and trust can be built.
If you are a designer, and there are words related to design, studio, and creation in your domain, will potential customers remember who you are better than your favorite cartoon name?
3. SEO and searchability
Containing keywords or a clear name will help search engines understand your website and make it easier to be found in search results.
This does not mean that you have to force keywords into the domain, but when your domain naturally matches the theme, SEO is a bonus that comes to you.
4. Avoid confusion
Avoid being too similar to competitors or other people’s domains to reduce misleading and brand risks.
I have seen too many cases: some students or start-ups happily registered a domain name, but it was only one or two letters different from a big brand, and received a letter from a lawyer a few months later. Therefore, it is recommended that before registering a domain name, you must first Google it to confirm that there is no trademark conflict.
5. Registered product quality
This is the most overlooked but most critical one.
Many people choose a registrar only based on price. My experience is just the opposite - cheap registrars often have problems when you need them most: they charge high fees when you want to transfer a domain, the backend interface is so difficult to use that you dare not touch it, you can’t find customer service when something goes wrong in the middle of the night, or there is a problem with the DNS settings but no one can help you…
When choosing a registrar, it is recommended that you look at at least these four things, including: reasonable and transparent prices, easy-to-use management interface, reliable customer service support, and complete solutions (domain, host, mailbox and SSL integration).
Four little reminders for easy mistakes
The next four principles are the most common pitfalls I have seen students step on over the years:
- Prefer common domain suffixes:
.com,.tw,.netare the first choice. Although unpopular domain suffixes are cheap, readers cannot remember them, have low trust, and are not good for SEO. - Avoid using hyphens and numbers (unless necessary):
my-best-site-2024.comis the kind of domain you will give up after pronouncing it to yourself twice. - Confirm trademark availability and avoid legal risks: Before registration, go to the Ministry of Economic Affairs Trademark Search System to check. It only takes five minutes and can save a lot of trouble in the future.
- The earlier you register, the more you can control your brand: A good domain is like virtual real estate, it will be gone if others register it first. If you already have preliminary ideas for a personal brand, first get both
.comand.tw. It will cost less than 1,000 yuan per year, but you will keep the option for ten years.
My domain registration strategy: why I own three
Many people are startled when they hear there are three domains at the same time: “Teacher Zheng, wouldn’t this be very confusing?”
Just the opposite. When your personal brand grows to a certain extent, one domain is definitely not enough. Because the three things of brand entrance, service products and content precipitation require completely different website characteristics. Let me use three of my own domains as examples and you will have a better idea of how this strategy works.
vista.tw: a long-term base for content accumulation
This is my main website for writing, AI practical, and systems thinking articles in the past few years. I use .tw because my main readers are in Taiwan. The name vista has been tied to my content for more than ten years, and the memory cost is close to zero.
Why choose the short vista.tw instead of the more formal vistacheng.tw? Because the content site needs to be easy to type—readers want to search for my article after the speech, enter the URL on their mobile phone, or share it with friends. Typing four less letters means reducing friction by 30%.
solo.tw: Sales base for services and products
This is my one-person business headquarters: consulting, workshops, online courses and SOLO methodology. The use of solo is a brand word (not my name), because I hope that this base can carry a service portfolio beyond Zheng Weiquan’s personal service in the future - student communities, cooperative lecturers, and cooperative courses can all be hung here.
Choosing .tw instead of .com is also a strategy: 95% of my services are currently focused on the Traditional Chinese market, and .tw actually strengthens the local professional signal, which is closer to the real target audience than the international feel of .com.
vistacheng.com: General entrance to personal branding
Simply put, this is like my official business card. The reason for using the full name vistacheng is that international occasions (including speech invitations, corporate cooperation or media interviews) usually require a clear identity; the reason for using .com is because this facade needs to carry the long-term brand assets of “Zheng Weiquan = writer, lecturer, AI content consultant” across markets and generations.
It is not a content site or an e-commerce website. It is a single-page entrance that allows strangers to quickly determine who Vista is and what it can do.
The division of labor between the three domains is essentially one brand and three roles
These three domains correspond to the same me, but three different character entrances:
vistacheng.com→ Who am I (Brand Entrance)vista.tw→ What I wrote (content base)solo.tw→ What do I provide (service goods)
Readers will not be lost no matter which entrance they enter, because each domain name is cross-linked to the other two. It’s like in the physical world, the same person can have multiple addresses such as studios, stores or performance spaces - separate, but let each space do its own thing.
Inspiration for you
Well, I’m not telling you to buy three domains right now, but you can ask yourself first:
- Will I need different brand names and service names in the future?
- Should my content be diverted from my sales?
- Will there be a difference between my international orientation and my local orientation?
As long as the answer to any question is “yes”, first remove the two key versions of .com and .tw to at least maintain future flexibility. For only $600 to $1,000 a year, in five years you won’t have to compete with strangers for your name.
How to choose a registrar: I recommend it myself
At this point, students’ next question is always: “Teacher, which registrar do you use?”
I have visited many stores over the years, and my current choices are divided into two lines:
International domain names (.com, .net, .io, .dev, etc.)
I recommend two, choose one according to the usage situation:
- Namecheap: transparent price, friendly backend interface, reasonable renewal price, and quick customer service response. People registering a domain for the first time can hardly go wrong starting here.
- Cloudflare Registrar: The price is almost the cost price, and it is fully integrated with Cloudflare’s own CDN, DNS, and SSL. If your website will originally use Cloudflare Pages or Workers, then put the domain name here together to make the entire management easier. I know a lot of Vibe Coding friends, and that’s how they work together.
I have been using both for a long time. For novices, I would recommend Namecheap, and for those with more technical needs, I would recommend Cloudflare.
Taiwan domain name (.com.tw, .tw, .idv.tw)
Here I only recommend one:
- Gandi: A long-established French registrar, founded in France in 1999, and in 2000 it became one of the earliest French domain registrars recognized by ICANN (Internet Organization for Assigned Names and Numbers). Taiwan domain name support is complete, and the backend interface is also very simple and refreshing.
I have used several local registrars in Taiwan, but from the interface and customer service side, I feel that there is still a lot of room for improvement. Therefore, Gandi is my most stable choice at the moment.
Don’t just look at the price, the domain name is your digital asset
I want to highlight this section in particular, because this is where I see most people get the short end of the stick.
At first glance, a domain name may seem like a small thing that costs a few hundred bucks a year, but it is what it is: a digital asset that accumulates traffic, trust, and SEO weight for your personal brand over the long term.
What’s the difference?
- For a domain that has been used for three years, the search engine ranking will steadily increase.
- Business cards, email signature files, and social links will all point to the same place
- Old readers will save the URL in their bookmarks
- Every article you write is linked to the same URL structure
These will become more valuable over time. If you choose a registrar that is cheap but makes you want to move after two years, the moving costs (traffic breakage, old link failure, SEO reconstruction) will be much higher than the cost you saved in the first place.
**Domains are not consumables, they are assets. ** Use the same criteria for selecting assets to select it.
Write here to give you the next step.
If you haven’t started designing your own website yet, maybe this article might be just in time.
I currently have two workshops directly related to Vibe Coding to help everyone start from scratch:
👉 Introductory Route: Vibe Coding Practical Workshop - Suitable for friends who have never written procedures and want to use AI to turn their ideas into a website
👉 Advanced route: Vibe Coding with Claude Code - Suitable for friends who want to turn Vibe Coding into daily development workflow and use Claude Code to string together complete project development
The tools used in the two classes are different, but they will all be brought to the domain and deployment stage after the website is launched. If after reading this article today, you still feel that you may not be able to master it, you are welcome to sign up for class and let me walk with you.
One last word for you:
A good domain name will not make a poorly designed website suddenly become good. On the other hand, a bad domain name may make a good website have a hard time.
Therefore, choosing a domain name must not be taken lightly! Spending an hour thinking it through beforehand can save you trouble for the next ten years. If you have any troubles in this area, you are welcome to contact me to make an appointment for consultation!
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