Archive for 'Domains'

Acronym Domain Names Are a Bad Idea

Posted on 18. Oct, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

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Before you blow most of your start-up capital (or life’s savings) on a great 3 or 4 letter .com domain, consider the following:

  1. Acronyms can stand for A LOT of different things.
  2. Are you sure there aren’t real word domains that would be a better fit for your business?
  3. 3 and 4 letter .coms are pretty much all claimed, which means if you want one, you’re going to have to buy it from someone else, and it is NOT going to be cheap.

MDN.com, CIOE.com, and DCWI.com are nice, short domains, but what do they stand for? Have you ever heard of any of these sites before? What do they sell? The domain name sure doesn’t provide any clues…

Back when I had my ISP, we were MDN.com (Metropolitan Data Networks)… but you would only know that if you lived in the same town we operated in because we advertised all over the place. On the web, we were frequently mistaken for the Midland Daily News, Media Daily News, and several other businesses with the same initials. [...]

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Advantages of geographically specific domain names

Posted on 10. Oct, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

1

I hear this from local small business owners frequently — they get a brilliant idea for a domain name, go to register it, and some cyber-squatter already has it. The obligatory rant about how cyber-squatters should be shot/thrown in jail/etc ensues.

The fact of the matter is nothing can be done about squatters right now, so we’re just going to have to be a little bit smarter about how we deal with selecting and registering our domain names.

There is no reason in the world that a brick-and-mortar business that does no advertising outside of its geographical area needs a generic domain name. Consider geographically specific domain names. If your store is in Lafayette, Indiana, you can find a ton of domains with your business type or busines name plus the word Lafayette (specific location). More generic business types might run into some squatters, but the asking price on those domains isn’t going to be 5 figures or more — I would be surprised if the BIN (Vocab word, kids: “Buy-It-Now”) price is over $1,000.

Not only are these domains more readily available, they are generally easier for consumers to remember, they create an automatic association with your community in the minds of the consumer, and they help the search engines direct users from your geographic region TO YOU. [...]

Popularity: 10% [?]

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