Before you register www.myname.com, consider:
Choose carefully: pick a name that’s easy to say, easy to remember and easy to spell. Shorter is good, but easy and memorable is better. Avoid traps like these:
- TWOWRITE.COM: over the phone, you’d have to spell it out, or somebody’ll think it’s tooright.com.
- WHOREPRESENTS.COM: Who Represents makes sense, but when you cram the two words together, it reads differently.
- WHITEHOUSE.GOV: Be careful that mistyping will not send your customers to an unwanted site. In this famous real-life example, whitehouse.com was a porn site, and whitehouse.org is still a parody site of the real White House Web site. Imagine the kids’ surprise!
Domains are cheap these days. Consider getting alternates (misspellings, abbreviations, slogans, etc.). You can easily point more than one domain name to your main Web site.
A quick note about search engines: key words in your domain name help your site to show up when someone searches for that key word. So www.abccorp.com might help brand your company, but www.small-widgets.com will score higher with search engines if people are looking for “small widgets.” (For more on search engines, see SEO Basics.)
In my opinion, .com is preferred unless you’re a nonprofit or educational organization. (Maybe in the future, .biz or another variant will catch up).
TIP: Every registered domain name has one to four contact names, who are authorized to manage that domain. Be sure your name is listed as one of them! (I’ve spent weeks retrieving domains for clients who didn’t do this). For example, you can list yourself as the Administrative and Billing contact, and your Web Consultant as the Technical contact.