What Is A Domain
A domain is one of the necessary components to having a website.
What is a domain?
Your domain is both the name of your website, e.g “example.com”, or “thewebsiteshop.ie” and the unique identifier used to locate your website.
Your domain will also determine what your official email address will be. If your domain is “example.com” then your email address will be “[email protected]”.
How do I get a domain?
Domains are registered through official registrars. You can go through this process yourself or we can register your domain for you.
Depending on the type of domain you wish to register you may need to provide paperwork.
What makes a good domain?
Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to choosing your domain:
- The domain should accurately reflect your company and brand. People should be able to know your company from reading your domain.
- The domain shouldn’t include hyphens. If your perfect domain is gone, but its alternative with a hyphen is available, don’t get it. The hyphen is very clumsy to say, it also means you have to include it when telling someone your email address. People forget to add in the hyphen, potentially contacting your competitor with the non hyphenated domain instead of you!
- If you’re planning to only trade locally, a domain that reflects that locality is good. For example, a “.ie” domain is best for the Irish market – it shows you’re Irish, and local and people prefer familiarity and accountability. Since “.ie” domains are regulated it also means your perfect domain is probably available as a “.ie”.
- Length of domain isn’t very important – people more commonly click on links rather than typing the domain in, but it shouldn’t be so long that it is hard to read or contains more than 2 or 3 words.
- Drop the “Ltd” – there’s no need to include this in your domain, it just adds to the length and again people will forget to include it when typing.
- Avoid abbreviations. Abbreviated domains may appear attractive because of how short they are. Many people also look at big companies such as IBM, DHL, BP and think it’s more impressive or corporate sounding to operate under an abbreviated name, but as a brandmark an abbreviation is doing no work for you. If your company name is “John Murphy Furniture” a potential new customer will have no idea what JMF stands for. If they’re interested in furniture, how are they to know that the F stands for Furniture? A name’s job is to communicate, and a non abbreviated name does this much more effectively.
