For less than the price of coffee and a sandwich, you can now do business behind the impressive looking you@yourname.com.

I helped a friend - let's call her Sally - set up her own domain name this week in preparation for her new business venture. Sally is trying to look professional, so she wanted help setting up sally@sally.com rather than sally@gmail.com or sally@myisp.com. She also wants the option of setting up a website at www.sally.com.

I agree that using your own domain name gives you an extra air of professionalism, but there are a few practical benefits as well. The main advantage is that you're not left at the mercy of any one provider. If you're using sally.com you can always change email provider, web host or ISP without the need to change your email address and website. You can also mix and match providers to create a best of breed solution. That way you're not left in the lurch if one of your providers goes belly up or just downhill.

Now Sally is not the most tech-savvy of people and she tends to want her hand held every step of the way. I'd previously set her up with a Gmail account, but talking her through the process of configuring her desktop mail client for Gmail was long and arduous. I was not looking forward to talking her through setting up her own domain name over the phone so, as she was already a Gmail user, I decided to Keep It Simple and try Google Apps.

I've got a Gmail account (several actually, like many people). I also use Google Docs and Google Calendar, but I've never played around with Google Apps because I already have my own domain name with email and websites hosted elsewhere (Fastmail and Quadra respectively). Both providers offer advanced features which suit my needs better than Google's offerings but, for your average punter who just wants to get a domain name up and running, Google Apps is hard to beat.

Google Apps basically rolls all of Google's online services into one neat package, all under your own domain name. If you're using the Google Apps Standard service it's completely free, you just need to cough up $10 per year for the domain name (unless you bring your own). The Premier Edition costs $US50 per year and adds extra features such as a bigger inbox, email archiving, Postini secure features, SSL enforcement for secure HTTPS access and more customer service options.

Google has a tie-in with eNom that lets you register a domain name as part of the Google Apps sign up process. It only lets you choose from com, net, org, info and biz, but thankfully Sally was content with sally.com so we didn't need to go elsewhere to buy sally.com.au.

All Sally had to do was choose a domain name and punch in her credit card details, Google did the rest. Straight away she could access her email via mail.sally.com, offering her the familiar Gmail interface. There was also a placeholder at www.sally.com, ready for her to start building a website. The fact she couldn't upgrade her existing Gmail account to use Google Apps was annoying, although she does have the ability to import her email from the old account to the new one.

For less than the price of coffee and a sandwich, Sally now does business behind the very impressive looking sally@sally.com. When the Google Apps option is so cheap and easy to set up, there's no excuse for not looking like a professional.

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