Choosing a domain name

Your domain name is your Internet address. Choosing the right domain name is an important part of getting an effective web site. We make recommendations when we send you a quote, but it is worth giving it some thought yourself.

An ideal name

Your domain name should, ideally

• be short and easy to type
• be easy to remember
• contain your trading name or the name people know you by, and
• include words that people will use when searching for sites like yours

This ideal is very hard to achieve. Imagine your business is called Wild Cranberry Gourment Icecream Ltd. A domain name of wcgi would be a short domain name. Short names are desirable because they are easy to type quickly and accurately, but there are other more important considerations. In this case, unless your customers know you by the abbreviation, they would struggle to associate your business with "wcgi". The lack of association also makes it harder to remember the domain name.

Various partial abbreviations such as wcranberrygice only make the situation worse; people cannot remember which part of your name is abbreviated and which is in full. It is better to use complete words and, if possible, your complete trading name.

A domain name that contains the full trading name would be wildcranberrygourmeticecream. This is a very long domain name, and one that is easy to type incorrectly. You would definitely want to look at shortening it if possible. One way is to selectively remove words to produce options like: wildcranberry, cranberryicecream, or wildcranberryicecream. The final choice depends on how well the domain name works to identify your business, balanced against the need for it to be short.

Notice that we have not put any spaces in the domain name. Spaces are not permitted in domain names. In fact the hyphen is the only punctuation permitted in a domain name. You could therefore consider cranberry-icecream or wild-cranberry-icecream which are both permitted domain names. The problem is that people find it hard to remember whether or not to put the hyphens in. It also makes the domain name hard to say: imagine a radio advertisement mentioning "wild hyphen cranberry hyphen icecream dot com". You are free to use hyphens, but think about it carefully before deciding.

On the other hand, domain names can be written using capitals (domain names are not case sensitive). So you could advertise wildcranberryicecream as WildCranberryIcecream. It does not matter if the capitals are used or not when typing in a browser.

An ideal TLD

As well as your domain name you also have to choose an ending; the part after the dot. Technically this part is known as a top level domain or TLD. There is a lot of choice in TLDs, but ultimately a business should use .com or .co.uk. These are the easiest to remember of all TLDs. We usually recommend .com if you sell internationally, or .co.uk if your market is primarily the United Kingdom. Other business options are, in order of preference, .biz .ltd.uk .plc.uk .org .org.uk .net .net.uk .info. In general other TLDs, such as .name or .me.uk are not suitable for business use.

Check availability

Once you have a few ideas sorted out see what is available.

Using our example, you might check wildcranberry and cranberryicecream. At the time of writing wildcranberry.com has been taken, so you might consider wildcranberry.biz. However cranberryicecream.com is still free and this would avoid potential confusion with wildcranberry.com. We will consider all of these factors when making recommendations on a domain name for you.

Registering your chosen name

At HilderBuild we register your domain name for you. We meet the cost of registration and all ongoing registration fees as part of our standard plan. There are no extra charges. However, you can register your domain name yourself if you wish. We will simply take over paying for it once you have a HilderBuild web site.