A company or person with a dot-com address is on equal standing with anyone else for these new extensions. name, is due shortly.Įven better, owners of the older domain names don’t have any claim on the newer versions. ws, which can be used for almost any purpose. Some are very flexible categories, especially. If a spelling doesn’t bring the results they expect - like that German company rather than me - and then use a search engine to find the actual site.įortunately for content creators looking for a better Internet brand, several new extensions were recently introduced: one for information sites (.info), an additional business category (.biz), a geographical extension for the United States (.us) and one for Websites (.ws). In real world usage, most people will try out a Web address once or twice in their browser and then move on. Alternatives such as or or didn’t look any better or easier to remember, so I went with my full name. At the time, Morgenstern GmbH, a German company owned, so there was no easy answer. By any measure, my name is long and difficult (for some) to spell correctly. Take for example, the URL of the production of the musical South Pacific now playing in San Francisco - Right.įive or so years ago, I faced the same dilemma when registering my own domain,. But what if a phrase or acronym falls at middle or the end of a name? Some groups try adding punctuation, which can make things worse. San Francisco can be brought into manageable length with SF. But it grows cumbersome when stringing together more than a couple of words.Īttempts to shorten words or use punctuation bring their own trouble. This approach can work if each word is short and easy to spell. ![]() Some spell out their whole name or company. For most businesses and even individuals, there’s someone else on the Internet with your name.įaced with this lackluster situation, businesses have tried ways to get around this problem, none of them really satisfactory. com extension were snatched up years ago by speculators and companies. Simple may be best for domain names, and because of this almost all good short names with the. Dot-com (.com) is the category most familiar to folks in the United States however, there were others for education (.edu), government (.gov), Internet Service Providers (.net), and non-profits (.org). Until recently there was a short list of domain categories, or extensions, controlled by an even shorter list of registrar organizations. For example, as I discussed in a previous column, you could host the Web server yourself. While there are companies that will do it all for you, each step can be done by a different company. Of course, there are really many other twists and turns in the straight path described so simply above. There are three major steps to gaining your domain: registering the domain, hosting your name on a Domain Name System (DNS) server, and finding a hosting service for your Web pages and other Internet services, such as e-mail. And for those of you who just want a more personalized e-mail address, I’ve found an inexpensive alternative. There’s no magic involved - the entire process is amazingly easy. There’s really no reason to overlook the opportunity of a personalized Web domain, or for those of us already with domains, to improve our current online branding. As with the many other changes in the post-Internet-bubble era, the cost of Web branding has fallen. When folks figured in the price of hosting services, it all added up quickly. ![]() Domain names even became the notorious subject of bidding wars among companies and owners. Setting up and maintaining a domain was tricky and expensive. A few years ago, domains were pricey and in limited supply. It must be obvious to readers - perhaps the most design sophisticated audience on the planet - that such simple things can make a strong impression, over and over again. ![]() Still, many Web-savvy content pros have bypassed the essentials of Internet branding, including a personalized domain and e-mail address. Is that strategy misguided? No way, it’s a fine thing and lets you spend your time creating content for clients rather than learning HTML coding to get a page to look just right. This seems to hold true for a number of the print-centric graphic designers and illustrators I’ve met recently. While some content creators have Web portfolios, it’s often just a page or two in an online gallery filled with other people’s work. Yet, very often creators neglect the basics of their own Internet brand strategy, forgetting that like charity, branding should start at home. Content creators are often the mainstay of the brand development process, establishing the details of a print identity or evolving the design and graphics for a corporate site.
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