In theory, choosing your domain name should be simple, particularly if you are building a website for an existing company: take the name of the organisation, remove the spaces and add a .com or similar extension to the end. While this may seem to be the best practice, there are a number of drawbacks in not thinking about your domain name in a logical manner.
While you may consider your company name to be vital to the promotion of your services, it is important to understand what you are hoping to achieve when you take your project online. It can be difficult to step away from a name steeped in tradition that you feel speaks of the values of your company and look to something completely different, but this may be the best way forward.
If your organisation has a particularly long name, think about how that would look written down as a web address. Would it transfer well to your print advertising? Would it fit well in a limited-width print advertisement or affect the way your business' stationery is designed or printed?
When it comes to promoting your website, think how easy it is for someone to remember your domain name. It goes without saying that something such as "brilliant.com" - a name that is both short in terms of the number of characters and memorable in the fact that it is a striking everyday word - is far easier to tell somebody over the phone or face-to-face than one that is many times longer.
Don't force a domain name either, adding dashes or underscores simply because another person has registered the name that you think you want. Again, trying to convey a domain name either in a one-to-one environment or in something such as a radio advertisement could prove tricky. The same can be said for using a name that relies on a unique or awkward spelling. If you choose "dynamik.com", how many people are going to try to spell that name with a "c" rather than a "k"? How annoying will it be to have to remind people each time you tell them your web address, "that's dynamic with a 'k', not a 'c'."
If your domain name is set in stone, ie your website has been online for some time, is generating a fair amount of traffic and places well in high-value search-engine results, then the upheaval of changing it for something more catchy may not be appealing, or even necessary. However, if you have recently launched a site and feel it is underperforming, asking yourself and your peers how they feel about the domain name and canvassing opinion on what may be better may prove to be beneficial in the long run. Indeed, by following this process at the outset, before a line of code has been written, may prove to be the best decision you ever made.
Dom Wint is the owner of Clean Page Design Limited, a web design company based in Saddleworth in the UK which specialises in getting small businesses, clubs and charities online. For more information, visit www.cleanpagedesign.co.uk.
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