Choosing a domain name
| Opinions differ widely on how to select a domain name. One thing that is clear is that research should be done so as not to infringe on the trademark of others as registering a domain name does not necessarily confer the legal right to use it. This lack of understanding has caused some domain holders to relinquish their domains. see more in the dispute section. It is probably best if the domain name is similar to the business name. That will reduce confusion among potential customers, and they may be able to guess at the domain if they become acquainted with your business name. Some people suggest keeping it short, but that can cause complications of its own, for you and others. It is probably better to use full words and have a domain name similar to what people would pronounce, than to worry about brevity. For example. Dacor Computer Systems registered the domain dacor.com rather than one more accurate, like dacorcomputers.com or dacorcomputersystems.com when the Dacor corporation (a manufacturer of scuba diving equipment) finally got around to registering a domain name, they selected divedacor.com since dacor.com was taken. It might be possible that if they chose to pursue legal avenues, they might be able to force Dacor Computer Systems to release dacor.com since Dacor it is the corporate name of Dacor Inc. and they might have a more valid claim to dacor.com than Dacor Computer Systems. If the business name has not been established yet, or may be changed to match the domain name, we suggest choosing as unique a name as possible. That can help make it a trademark and eliminate the need to register it under every county code TLD, and every possible variation of spelling. Otherwise, someone may hyphenate your domain name, use an underscore, a plural version, or some other permutation for themselves. It might not be possible for you to choose a unique name. In that case, you may want to register variations of it so that no one else may benefit from your efforts in publicizing your site. For instance, in our earlier example of frenchwines.com, variations include frenchwine.com, french-wine.com, french_wine.com, french-wines.com, and french_wines.com, as well as the .net and .org domains. These could be pointed to the same site as frenchwines.com so that entering any of these variations would direct users to the same location. | |
| Choosing a domain name can be found in the following categories: Domain Names |