Many people ask me what is the best way to create a professional looking email address that they can use for their website or business. Gmail and Yahoo are fine, but most of the time they do not portray the image you want to associate with a professional project.

Because of a lot of the work I do for clients, the sites I admin, and my own businesses I have an array of email addresses and business cards I use which need to portray a professional face for my company, and allow people to easily contact me.

Having something easy to remember is key. People need to be able to remember how to contact you. Because of this I recommend that people setup their email address on the domain they own.

If you have followed my blog you know that a lot of the articles I write are about hosting and working with domains, especially Dreamhost. The reason I focus on their service is because it is easy to use and gives users full control over their website and business.

Now to setup a professional looking email on your Dreamhost domain you would first need to login to your control panel.

Once you have done this you need to go the “Manage Domains” section of the user panel. This will show you a list of all the domains you own. For our example let’s say we own a domain called “unqiuebusiness.com”.

Look the right of your name / address and you will see a section that says “Email”. If you have not setup an email on your domain it will say no address under this column. Click on the link in the “Email” column and it will take you to a page where you can setup a professional looking email for your business.

On the next page it will show you a list of the domains you own. Select the domain you would like to setup an email on and click “Create New Email Address”.

The next page will give you an option to setup a “Fully Hosted” email address or a “Forwarding” address only. I prefer to setup forwarding because that way I don’t have 20 different email addresses. All my mail comes to one address I specify.

Under forwarding select the domain you would like to setup the email address on. In this case we will select “uniquebusiness.com”. Then create the name for the email address. I’m choosing “admin”. So now my email address will be admin@uniquebusiness.com.

Now for the last part, select the box that says “List all email addresses to forward to”. Here you will type in the email address you would like your email to be forwarded to. This can be an existing gmail or yahoo account.

Once you have this complete click the blue “Forward to these addresses button”. This will now enable email forwarding to the email address you specified.

Congratulations you have now created a unique professional email address that you can use with your website or business. The great thing about having your own domain is that you can setup as main professional emails as you would like. Any email people send to your new email will be forwarded to your existing account.

In my next article I will outline how to setup your existing Gmail account to reply to people using your professional email address.