June 21, 2004

Your WWW address: How good (or bad) is your domain name?

Just as a good location in the real world can help your business, a good domain can enhance your digital presence and identity. Your company's domain name is your online address, your location in the digital world.

You use this web address for your website, www.yourcompany.com, and for your email, you@yourcompany.com.

A bad domain name can have a negative impact on your company's Internet identity, your website traffic, your company's email communications, and more. Using a good domain name is important.

So what makes a good domain name?

Ideally your domain name should be short, simple, easy to spell, memorable, and easy to say. It's also good if your domain name is your company name. But if your company or organization name is long and difficult to spell then it may be best to use something else, such as a company slogan. Your company name might also not be available as a domain name, in that case you need to discover what your best options for a domain name are.

To understand more about what makes a good or bad domain name, we'll look at two real world examples.

Example 1:
The Women Entrepreneurs of Saskatchewan, a non-profit association that helps women in Saskatchewan start businesses. This is the association's domain name:

www.womenentrepreneurs.sk.ca

This is a bad domain name for a number of reasons. People will have an extremely hard time spelling 'entrepreneurs'. The first word in the domain name 'women' could easily be entered incorrectly as 'woman', 'womans', or 'womens'. Also, 'entrepreneurs' could be entered incorrectly in its singular version 'entrepreneur'. It is visually difficult to see this domain name as the two separate words 'women' and 'entrepreneurs', the domain name looks more like four or five different words at first glance. Finally, the end of the domain name, .sk.ca, is less common on today's Internet and people might try looking for the site at www.womenentrepreneurs.ca or even www.womenentrepreneurs.com.

The good news is that the association has many options for a better domain name, and they can keep the current domain name and easily have it point to the new one. A few options for a new domain name (which were available to register at the time this article was written) include:

www.saskwomen.com
www.wesask.com
www.womeninbusiness.ca
www.businessforwomen.ca

All of these domain names are better than the association's current domain name. All are easier to spell, easier to say, and are more memorable. If anyone involved with the Women Entrepreneurs of Saskatchewan reads this article, please feel free to use any of the domain names suggested here.

Example 2:
ROCY Homes is a high-end custom homebuilder in the Saskatoon area. ROCY is also an Arxus SmartSite client. ROCY Homes uses a very short dot-com domain name for its website:

www.rocy.com

This domain name is very, very good. It happened to be for sale by an Internet company that had registered thousands of four letter combinations as domain names. We decided immediately that a domain name this good was easily worth the sale price.

ROCY Homes was previously using a longer domain name:

www.rocyhomes.com

But the shorter version is better because some people don't know how to properly spell ROCY. On the phone the company can simply say 'Our website is at R O C Y dot com', instead of telling people rocyhomes.com and then also explaining how to spell ROCY.

Shorter domain names also add credibility. A long, obscure domain name tells people your company missed the boat on the explosion of the Internet, so you were not able to get a good domain name for your website.

Summary
So, just from these two examples it is clear that a good deal of thought should be given to your company's domain name. Simply using your company's full name isn't always the best solution.

With more and more companies registering domain names, it is getting harder to get good domain names, but there are always workable options if you look hard enough. Especially with new domain name options such as .BIZ, .INFO, .NAME, and many more being offered soon.

The important point to remember is that a good domain name will contribute to your company's bottom line, and that's worth some consideration.

If you want to learn more about your domain name and whether or not you could improve it, please click here to contact us.

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