Choosing the Right Domain Name

Here's yet another situation where the World-Wideness of the Internet becomes a disadvantage rather than an advantage. In the old days, you could have local businesses named "Joe's Appliance" in every state and every country, all listed in local business directories, and no one cared or got them confused. Now joesappliance.com is a single, worldwide name. Only one business can have it. Once there's a joesappliance.com in Auckland, New Zealand, there can't be another one in Los Angeles, California, or Pretoria, South Africa.

The best solution to this problem is more use of "country codes" like .uk (United Kingdom), .za (South Africa), and .us (United States). The U.S. hopes to break the .us top-level domain down further by states, using the common post office two-letter abbreviations for them, so you could have a joesappliancea.ca.us in California and a joesappliances.ny.us in New York. But for the moment, .com is king of the commercial Internet in customers' minds, so we need to be creative.

Joes-appliances.com is obvious, but will customers remember it or will they be confused? Joes_appliances has the same problem; "-" and "_" are about the only punctuation marks allowed in domain names (apostrophes aren't, which is why the original one wasn't "joe'sappliances.com") so there is little chance to get clever that way. You can't use capitalization, since upper case and lower case don't matter in domain names; to the "root servers" that translate human-readable domain names into IP (Internet Protocol) numerical addresses like 131.103.237.139, JoesAppliances and joesappliances are exactly the same.

You may want to try using your physical location as part of your domain name if the one you'd prefer is already taken. JoesOfLosAngeles.com may not be as elegant as you'd like, but chances are it's still available for you, and if it's not, something like Joe'sLAappliance.com, JoesApplianceLA.com or some other useful combination will be.

Make a list of possible names. Incorporate your business's name or some part of it if at all possible. Come up with a few others that don't use your business name, too. Shorter is better, but chances are you are going to have a minimum of 10 letters these days; most domain names shorter than that are taken.

The next step is to go to one of the domain name registries (use Google and the search words "domain registry" to find them) and try out your favorite name selections to see which ones, if any, are available. Note the "ones" instead of "one" you can have more than one domain name for your site, possibly one long one, like JoesAppliancesOfLosAngeles, and one shorter, catchier one, like JoesWashers.

Now register the name or names you have chosen, following the domain registrar's instructions (they're all easy), but first, please check this bold-type warning:

Get the spelling right!

Domain name registration is an automated process, and the computers that handle it will accept JoesAppliances just as happily as they will accept JoesAppliances. This is not a place to make mistakes that will embarrass you later. Domain name selection and registration are two of the most critical parts of your Internet business presence, and deserve plenty of thought and care at every step.

There is one last, increasingly imporant, but typically overlooked factor in selecting a domain name: Make sure it doesn't infringe on someone else's copyright or trademark. Five years ago lawsuits over domain names were rare. Now they've become common. Just because a domain name isn't registered doesn't mean it doesn't infringe on someone's copyright. Imagine registering FastEZPlumbing.com as the online sales channel for your new line of snap-together water inlet fittings, building that domain name and sales from your site to a respectable level, and then, one morning, you receive a letter from a law firm representing Fast EZ Plumbing Fixtures, Inc., saying that you are infringing upon their trademark, which they've held since 1958. Fast EZ Plumbing Fixtures, Inc., wants you to give your domain name to them, because it's really theirs, thank you very much.

What now? Run up a big legal bill trying to keep "your" name? Change your domain name and hope all your customers find the new one? Either choice will be expensive. The best course of action, if you find yourself in this situation, is to try to work out some accomodation with the other party. Perhaps you turn over your domain to them, but in return they place a prominent link to your new one on the main page of their site. Or perhaps you help them find a similar domain name, like Fast-EZ-Plumbing.com, and your two companies exchange links so that both of your Web presences are multiplied.

Or you can try to avoid this kind of problem before it happens, by checking trademark registries before you invest promotional effort into a domain name. You can do this research online. In the U.S., the Patent and Trademark Office's URL is www.uspto.gov. In the U.K., go to www.patent.gov.uk. Almost every country has something similar. You should check with an attorney wherever you are, since trademark laws vary from country to country, and even in the U.K. and U.S. they can be fuzzy and hard to understand.