How to Select a Domain Name for your organization:
Selecting a domain is an important step for any company, from brick and mortar
shops to completely online ventures. There has been much press about the
lack of domains available and rapid rate of registration however there are still
hundreds of thousands of excellent domains which have yet to be registered.
When selecting a domain it is important to think why the
domain name system exists in the first place. It is there to map computer
friendly IP addresses such as 154.52.254.25 to human friendly names such as
yourcompany.com. You should think about human friendly names when making
your selection. Here are some pitfalls that should be avoided:
- Avoid names which can be easily confused with other
names. You don't want to have users struggling to get to your site or
even worse, ending up at a competitors. An example of this pitfall
would be a company that registers buy4less.com when another company already
has buyforless.com. If you are registering a name that would be easily
confused with other names consider registering these names as well or better
yet, register a name which can not be easily confused with other names in
the first place.
- In addition to avoiding confusion with other sites you
must ensure that your site can be typed phonetically. This means if
you tell someone your domain name over the phone they should be able to
easily type it without you having to spell the entire domain. An
example pitfall in this case would be a domain like online-sales.com where
you have to say the hyphen or they would not reach your site.
- Another pitfall is selecting names which can not be
easily typed or are difficult to spell. This includes words that sound
different than they spell or domains which use words that have multiple
common spellings.
You can learn a lot from the most popular sites on the
internet today such as yahoo, amazon, and google. These companies domains
are short, easy to type and easy to remember.
. Domain Name Registration 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004.