If you are starting a new business, chances are that you are starting a new website as well. Creating the image of your company and your brand online is extremely important, as the Internet is the way that most businesses thrive (or, alternately, fail) in this day and age.
In addition to making sure that the design and web-tools on your new site are effective and easy to use, you also need to consider what your website is going to be called and how people are going to be able to find it online. This name for your website is referred to as a “domain name”.
Domain names are the part of your web address that comes between the “www.” and the suffix that you choose, be it “.com”, “.biz”, “.org”, etc. This is how people are going to remember your website, and come back to it time and time again.
If you choose the wrong one, you may end up shooting yourself (or your company) in the foot, as you will not be able to effectively attract new customers and clients to your website.
But what makes finding the perfect domain name difficult these days is the fact that all of the very simple ones are taken. If you have a used car dealership for example, you are never going to be able to register a name like “cars.com”, or “usedcars.com”, because names like this will either all be taken, or will be extremely expensive to buy. Instead, you must think of something more innovative.
If the name of your car dealership is short and easy to spell, then this would be a great domain to register. But if your dealership is named ‘Kowalcyks Lot’ or ‘Nguyen Cars’, you might not be able to count on the public to find your website if it uses those hard-to-spell names.
So what is the solution in a situation like this? Often, the best thing to do is find a simple combination of words that will stick in the public’s consciousness, and be easy to spell. Try something like deesidecars.com, yournewcar.com, or buyusednow.com.
Depending on how basic the combination is, the domain name might have already been purchased by someone who is “sitting” on it, trying to sell it to prospective buyers. Try to avoid this situation if you can. For example, buyused.com might go for a high price, while you can purchase buyusednow.com at a more reasonable rate.
The one temptation that you want to stay away from is choosing a suffix other than “.co.uk or .com”. The majority of the Internet-using public will assume that any website name ends in these most basic suffix’s, even if they are told and constantly reminded otherwise.
You do not want to lose traffic because everyone assumes that your website is usedcars.com, when it is really usedcars.org.
The final pitfall you want to avoid is altering a spelling in a way that might confuse people who want to come to your website.
If you go with usedcarz.com, with a “z” instead of an “s”, this might be passable, if you mention it in your ads repeatedly, making sure that it is driven into people’s heads that there is a z at the end of the website name.
But it is best to avoid such a situation all together and choose something that is commonly spelled.
