Domain names are an extension of your company name and in fact as the web grows more and more important often time’s companies are more readily identified by their domain name than their actual name. There are all sorts of various implications to a domain name such as brand recognition, making it easy for people to find you, trade marking and even search engine optimization ramifications. We won’t get into what makes a good domain name here, perhaps in the future we can tackle that as it deserves special attention. What we want to cover is what actions you should take, right now regarding your domain name.
The first action is at the very moment your thinking about a domain name you want is to go buy it. This may sound silly but you would be surprised at the instances where huge companies did not acquire a domain that they ultimately wanted. If anyone from the company SunScope ($100 million in sales in 2007) is reading this please don’t think we are picking on you, but in looking at the ASI Top 40 Supplier list we couldn’t help noticing their domain name. The name of the company is SunScope but their domain name is sunscopeusa.com so we did a quick look to discover why that might be. Logically you always want the shortest, most easily recognizable domain name, and its pretty logical sunscope.com would be a much better fit than suncopeusa.com (admit it, how many thousands of people a year end up first on sunscope.com first when they really want sunscopeusa.com) We did a “Whois” look up on sunscope.com and discovered that it was registered in 1997 by a company that provides natural lighting. Next we did a “Whois” look up for sunscopeusa.com and saw that they registered their name in 2003. There’s probably some poor IT guy that took the blame for that one and lost his job over a $9.00 registration that takes about 5 minutes to complete. SunScope has been in business since 1943 so it’s not like they weren’t aware of the name they wanted.
The moral of the story is domain names are extremely cheap to buy and takes no time at all, but once their gone, that’s it their gone.
The next quick subject to think about if you want to be the master of your domain are extensions, or “LTD’s”. This is what comes after the name itself such as .com, .net .info, ect. If you are fortunate enough to grab the domain that you wanted always grab at least the .net version as well, (heck we recommend if it’s the domain of your dreams to grab em all). Some readers are probably thinking right now, why should I bother spending a whole extra $9.00 on a domain I’ll never use that’s trademarked to boot so no one else can use it? Well, ask your self one question; “How much did the last quick phone call you made to your lawyer cost”? Answer; way more than $9.00; don’t let some unscrupulous person put up a page with the .net version of your domain name and attempt to profit off of it because you did not want to spend that $9.00.
Hmmmm, actually I do hope someone at SunScope is reading this humble page. They might want to empty out the cup with the coffee money and grab this name
Maybe that IT guy didn’t get fired after all.
