Domain names

Choosing a proper domain name for your business is not necessarily an easy task (and I'm not even talking about choosing a good name for your business, which took me several months to achieve, as I am assuming that you've passed that step already). Especially in this day and age, when there are a gazillion domain names out there, and chances are that somebody already thought of the name you are after, and also quite likely, that a business with the same or similar name to yours already exists somewhere else in the world.

First, a bit of background info: anybody can register domain names (note the word I used, as nobody really owns a domain name, one can only register it for a certain period of time. This is administered by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is a global trusted non-profit organization. Under them are the registires (244 around the world, last time I counted), which are still non-profit. INTERNIC is the one that is responsible for most general top-level domains (such as .com, .net, .org, etc), and CIRA, for example is the Canadian organization that is governing our country code top-level domain (ccTLD), .ca. The next level down in the pyramid are the registrars, which are for-profit companies that take your money for doing the paperwork around registering your domain name.

Second, a bit of terminology: to understand the different parts of a URL (aka Uniform Resource Locator) without going into too much (boring?) details.

• A domain name usually consists of two or more different parts (also called labels), separated by dots, such as example.com. Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD). There are 280 TLD's, out of which 248 are ccTLD's, or country code top-level domains.
• events.example.com is a subdomain of a domain above it, example.com. Normally, only the person (whether an individual or a business) who registered a top-level domain can have a subdomain under that domain. In some rare cases, you can get permission from the the person who registered the top domain to use a subdomain, but for most businesses it would not make sense.

So let's examine what a good domain name is...

• Whether a business uses 'www' in their domain name or not, is really up to them, but the trend certainly has been for the last few years that the 'hip' companies would NOT use them. Pretty much anybody who sees a .com, or .net, or .org at the end of a 'word' will know that the only thing s/he could do with that is looking it up on the internet, so I strongly advise my clients to keep it clean and drop the 'www' (it is a matter of a setting on the server, so once you made the decision, let your web master know)
• I also suggest that my clients use CamelCase when putting their URL on their marketing materials. I believe that it is much easier to read and remember 'ThisIsJustAnExample.com' than 'thisisjustanexample.com'. And after all, the most important about a URL is to be memorable, so people will look your website up.
• Many of my clients want short URL's. Well, those days are pretty much gone. I remember one of my professors in college complaining about how 'all the good domain names are gone' over a decade ago. What he meant was that most short (three to five letter) domains were already registered. I disagreed with him then, as I believe that remembering 'tijae.com' is much harder than 'ThisIsJustAnExample.com', hence I'm not really into short domain names.
• Most businesses will want to have a .com domain name. It is fine, although I encourage my Canadian clients who do business strictly within Canada to choose a .ca domain name instead. However, I have one warning with that: make sure that you choose a '.ca' domain name that has no '.com' counter part registered yet, and DO register the .com as well (it's a simple setting on the server level to point both the '.ca' and '.com' domains to your site). There are two reasons for that:
  1. Some people will not remember the fact that you have a '.ca' name and will try to type it with a '.com'.
  2. Once your site becomes really popular, you don't want the risk that somebody opens a similar site under '.com', or worse yet, opens a site that has nothing to do with what you do, and your potential clients will get totally confused.
• Companies that only exist on the web (or start out there) will most likely choose their domain name first, and adept that as their company name. In such cases I always suggest to brand their business with the domain name, and whenever they write or say their business name, use the full URL with the extension (example.com).

This is it about domain names in a nutshell. Contact us if you'd like more information.