A domain name is your address on the Internet – it’s also where your visitors find you, it’s where your emails are sent to/from and it’s a huge marketing tool.
Choosing a good domain name
Domain names, like our own quantumtech.club, should be short and memorable. Visitors should have to resort to Google every time they want to visit your site. They should also give a hit to visitors as to what the site is about.
Some good domain names might include:
- southportcollege.ac.uk – The college in Southport
- webdesignliverpool.co.uk – Great if lots of people search Google for web designers in Liverpool
Don’t choose a bad domain name
Again, these domain names speak for themselves, no narrative is required from us – but these might not be a good choice (none of these domains were live at the time of writing):
- healthycheapchinesetaewayfoods.co.uk – Too long, easily misspelt, won’t be remembered
- oceans.co.uk – Great, but who are they and what do they do? Why’s nobody bought it?
In the old days most domain names ended with .com, .org, .co.uk and .org.uk. These endings are called Top Level Domains (TLDs). So many clubs would choose a domain name with a .org.uk TLD as they were a British organisation, rather than a British company (.co.uk). However, today there are a lot more meaningful TLDs.
Our own domain name uses a .club TLD. This means that we can keep our domain short and sweet – we don’t have to include the word ‘club‘ before the TLD. The other thing is that quantumtech.club just trips off the tongue, quantumtechclub.org.uk is just that bit more awkward to say.
They must work for emails too
Remember that, not only will your web site use your domain name, but your email addresses will too. Make the domain name to hard to remember, or spell, and important and valuable email may never be received.
Check to see if your domain name is available
All too often, you spend hours working out a great domain name for your club and find out that it’s not available because somebody else owns it.
A domain name registrar is a company that specialises in registering domain names for you. You can use any of them to check whether the domain name of your dreams is available. A visit to 123 Reg, for example, will enable you to see whether your chosen domain name is available.
Check the availability of quantumtech.club and it will tell you that the domain name is not available, but suggest some alternatives. Check for seftonhamradio.club and you will see (at the time of writing) that the domain has not yet been registered and you can purchase it there and then. However, don’t – we’ll discover more in the next session.
