Think VERY carefully before deciding on a domain name. Like a tattoo, a domain name has the potential to damage your brand for life!
Despite the fact that folks these days think that Google IS the internet, an address can make or break you.
Don’t look spammy
Most content, most traffic, and most email on the Internet is spam. So the most important thing you can do to win trust from a distrustful world of Internet users is to prove that you are human.
Spam websites, created by machines, very often live on hyphenated domains, like “spammy-blog-site-dot-com”, so we recommend that you choose a domain name without hyphens in it.
Make your domain work for you
Though it is an advantage to have words describing your location and your produce in your address, this is not essential, especially if your business isn’t constrained by geography.
But let’s say you run a business scrapping cars in the Tamworth area of the UK.
- A suitable domain name, then, would be on the dot-UK top level.
- It would contain the name of the town of Tamworth.
- It would include a reference to scrapping cars.
Where can I get a domain name?
Play and experiment with potential names at NameCheap, here, or PorkBun, here.
If you want to be global, go dot-com.
The domain name system has been around for decades. So dictionary words and generic phrases are usually terribly expensive, or in the hands of speculators, sitting on them, waiting for a profit. The last dictionary word to fall to corporate owners was the evocative syphilis-dot-com.
If, like some of us, you are in the UK and do not want to export, go for .CO.UK or .UK (cheaper generally, too), or whatever country you are in. Or if you absolutely must, go comedy value, from the comprehensive list of available suffixes here. If you are a massive Star Trek fan with a spare $385,000 USD, you could have B.org
Be aware that you will be spelling this address out to folks, quite literally, forever. But brevity may not be your friend either. This also applies to email addresses with the big free email providers.
The shortest available GMail addresses are six characters long, so some fool (Jamie) thought it’d be a good idea to remove the vowels from “Immersion Heaters” and have “immhtr” as his address. Now I (Jamie) have to spell it out, using the phonetic alphabet every bloody time, because of my gammy Mercian Accent, “Indigo, Mother Mother…” This is a PITA.
Give me an example
Let’s take our car scrapping business to porkbun.com. We type in TamworthCarScrapping-dot-co-dot-UK. We’re lucky! It’s available and we secure tamworthcarscrapping.co.uk for the equivalent of £8 a year.
Although that address contains a real-world location and generic words, that particular combination has never been take before, so we can register it.
And that is a good approach for you to imitate: Combine relevant words into a unique domain in a way that no one else has yet.
Now we have a home on the Web, let’s move in and read “How To Build A Website“.