Bought a domain name, but completely clueless what to do next. Can anyone recommend a book or guide or whatever?

You need to purchase webhosting, which is basically hard drive space on someone’s computer server. There are tens of thousands of webhosting companies to choose from. Once you have an account, your webhosting company will give you its nameserver addresses, which you will need to enter into your account at your domain registrar (which I’m guessing is GoDaddy). These nameservers basically tell your browser where to find the website that has your domain name.

It’ll probably be easiest, though not cheapest, to simply use GoDaddy as your webhosting service. I don’t know how reliable they are, but it’ll probably be easier to integrate the separate domain and webhosting aspects of creating a website in one place.

You should spend some time at webhostingtalk.com. That’s where I learned all about purchasing domains and webhosting space. If you want a recommendation for a reliable webhosting service, send me a private message.

Thank you drdoombot, I’ll PM you as well as check out the site you recommended. Thanks for taking the time to respond, I learned a lot :)

And then you need web content to post on the web host, which means creating web pages in HTML and uploading them to the host. That’s what provides the content that people will see when they go to the URL that corresponds to your domain name.

For webhosting, I’ve been satisfied with Lunarpages.com after using two others that I did not like so well.

The next steps are finding a hosting service and then building your website.
If it sounds daunting, it’s not as bad as some might make it out to be.
Building a basic website is not difficult because there are a myriad of different templates available.
Good luck with your web endeavors!

You could just make a website at http://www.freeservers.com/ or any other free host, and have that be your website, and use your domain-name that you paid for to just automatically forward all visitors to your free website. That way you don’t have to pay any more money. And to visitors, it will be seemless. The ads they see will be cheesy, but the experience will be as seemless as visiting any other site.

Silly question, but what do you want the do with the domain? Web hosting, email hosting?

For webhosting I have had very good success with Liquidweb and MediaTemple they are more expensive than dirt cheap providers but they have fantastic support.

For email hosting you can use whats provided by your webhost. I recommend seperating the email from the webhosting. Use something like google apps for domains.