If you’ve ever considered buying a domain name for the primary purpose of creating a custom email address such as your-name@your-domain.com, this tutorial from Ask Leo! is just what you need. In it, Leo Notenboom explains domain registration, email forwarding, and using a free email service (such as Gmail) with your custom domain.

If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.

If you are tired of changing your email address whenever your ISP changes, buying your own domain name is a simple way to assure that you can keep the same email address year after year. A domain costs about $8 to $18 per year, depending on where you buy it. Once you own your domain (such as “your-name-here.com”), you can then pick an email address such as “me@your-name-here.com” and have your domain registrar forward all incoming email to either your ISP email address, or a free webmail provider such as Gmail or Yahoo.

Today’s tip is for anyone who owns a domain name. Because of an ICANN (Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers) policy change implemented late last year, it is possible to lose control of a domain if you fail to respond to an email transfer request. Since email has become bogged down with spam and spam filters, this puts everyone who owns a domain at risk. The solution is to lock your domain name with your domain registrar. This will prevent transfers and ownership changes, until the domain is unlocked. If you do not see a lock option in your domain management interface, ask your registrar to do it for you.

When writing about your website, should you include the “http://” in your URL? Here’s a rule of thumb. For offline use, such as business cards and envelopes, drop the “http://” prefix. But for anything electronic, such as word processing documents or e-mail messages, always include the “http://” because in many applications it makes your link clickable.

If your Web site is on a free server (such as space provided by your Internet service provider or Yahoo! Geocities) you might suffer from long URL syndrome. You know what I mean. Long Web site addresses that look like http://yourinternetserviceprovider/users/~yournamehere/mybestphotos are unwieldy, hard to remember, and difficult to click on in email messages because they often wrap onto two lines. Help yourself to a shorter URL at TinyURL ( http://tinyurl.com ) or Shorl ( http://shorl.com/ ).