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Domain Name Management

What's in a (Domain) Name?

The first step in establishing a web presence and building a website is to select and register your domain name.

Choosing a domain name is not a trivial decision; it is as important as coming up with a strong company or product name.

According to Netcraft, as of November 2008 there were more than 180 million individual websites posted on the World Wide Web, Google is now searching over 1 trillion individual Web pages, and Domain Tools puts the total number of active domains at 106 million.

Although the Internet presents users with a wonderful tool for research, entertainment, communication, and commerce, we are faced today with the problems of clutter and overload. There is too much information for the consumer to digest, too many websites competing for his attention, and too many online stores and brands competing for his dollars.

For this reason, you should be — quite appropriately — incredibly choosy about the domain names you adopt for your websites. The domain name is an essential element — perhaps the most essential — in establishing and communicating an online brand.

There are three major reasons businesses tend to gravitate toward a particular domain name:

Positioning and branding. It might be a variation of their product name or product category.
Association. The Internet marketer believes Internet surfers would go to the name when looking for information on that specific topic. Pardon the example, but a porn site operator might register the domain topless.com based on the assumption that Web surfers looking for a pornography site would try that URL.
Memorability. The website marketer believes that visitors will find the domain name easy to remember. This is the reason why a printer with a four-color press might decide to register the domain name colorprinting.com.

Choosing Your Domain Name

What makes for a good name on a website? Debate rages, but here are three criteria that are hard to disagree with:

Memorable. Why is an online bookstore called Amazon.com? Simply because it's easy to remember. Same thing with the portal called Yahoo!
Logical. Another tactic that works is to select a name that logically ties in with what you do. Some examples include printing.com for a printer and flowers.com for a florist. Or, simply make the domain name the same as your company name. For example, IBM's domain name is IBM.com. And Sprint Graphics, a New York City printer, uses sprintgraphics.com.
Short. Some marketers prefer longer domain names because they can be more descriptive. For instance, one printer has a website with the domain printingforless.com. It gets a message across, but will you really remember that when you are online and need printing? Although domain names can be as long as sixty-seven characters, shorter — like printer.com — is better. Think about the website URLs you can recall off the top of your head without going to your bookmarks. How many of them are more than one or two words long at most? It's no coincidence that one of the most popular online retailers is Amazon.com.

You can't copyright, patent, or register human names and book titles, which means multiple people can have the same name and different books can have the same title.

But domain names, like phone numbers, are unique. So when in doubt, it pays to register any name you might want and hold it, rather than risk letting it go to someone else. Register your Internet domain name early. When in doubt about a name, register it anyway.

What if the Domain Name You Want is Taken?

According to DomainTools, 5.62 new domains are registered every second. So, the shorter, more logical sounding .com domain names have largely been exhausted.

Just as 800 numbers have a certain amount of cach&131; over 888, 877, and 866 numbers, which some people question whether or not they're really toll-free, .com domain name still have a certain amount of user reliability as opposed to .net, .us, .biz, and other domain extensions. However, just as people are becoming more comfortable with 877 and 866 numbers now that most of the 800 numbers have been taken, people are also becoming more used to domain names that don't end with .com.

So, while we still recommend our clients register a good .com domain name whenever possible, there are alternatives to buying the .com domain name you want from someone else for a hefty fee: registering the same domain name you wanted as a .com with an alternative extension. These can include .org, .net, .edu, .biz, .info, and .us among others. So, if consult.com is taken, maybe you can grab consult.biz or consult.info.

Kethyr Solutions is a Domain Name Registrar

Interested in a domain name, but too busy to check into it? Let Kethyr Solutions find out if it is available, for free!

Most business owners are extremely busy and do not have time to worry about managing their domain name or remembering to renew. Kethyr Solutions will make sure your renewals are done in a timely manner, eliminating any chance of ever losing your domain name simply because someone forgot!

Kethyr Solutions can register and manage .com, .net, .org, .biz, .cc, .info, .name, .us and .uk domain names for just $34.95 a year.