Your Digital Front Door: Why Your Business Needs Its Own Domain Name

I am going to talk about getting a domain name for your business and why you might want to go that route.

Go with a well-known registrar.

Godaddy.com
Namecheap.com
networksoultions.com

Those are just to name a few.

Domain Name

What is a domain name, you might ask? I can provide the long history of the domain name, including that it became available in 1985. How they were free up until 1995, when Network Solutions started to charge $100 for two years. You can have up to 63 characters before the extension, .com,.uk, and so on.

You can have up to 253 characters if you really want to. But why would you?

The domain was formed due to, let’s say, laziness; no one wanted to memorize a whole bunch of numbers.

I don’t want to give a whole lesson and bore you.

Your Domain

Like I said in the previous post

This is your digital land. Where you will define your business, the ownership, branding, and what your business is all about.

Brand Real Estate
Consistency
The Trap to avoid

Brand Real Estate

Just like your home or your business storefront. It showcases on the World Wide Web. Please be careful with what you call it.

If you look around the Internet, you will see names like

Apple.com
HP.com
Nomatic.com
dji.com
microsoft.com

These are just a few samples of good brand use of companies on the Internet, showing how they showcase what they offer.

Consistency

This also provides the consistency of what the companies actually do. You can move from the storefront to the internet, and you will get almost the same experience.

Avoid the Trap

What am I talking about here? Well, there are several traps you can get into.

Buying a domain through a locked-in website builder versus using a dedicated registrar (giving you full control over your DNS records).

This could cause some major issues.

You might ask what these locked-in things are

Wix
Squarspace
Shopify
Weebly

The registration is tied to their web hosting services.

If you want to pack it up and use it somewhere else, you can’t.

My Fake Company

I have a lawn mower and tractor racing company. Where you can bring your riding lawn mowers in, and I will modify them to race. I also do tractors.

Own my own track, and I even offer races for the DIY racers.

My domain name is

CustomTractorAndMowerRacing.com

Now that is a good name, but is it practical? In my opinion, no, it isn’t; it is a bit long.

Now this domain name

MowAndTowRacing.com

Now that is shorter and a little better to remember.

I will get into this in the email post.

My Take

My take on domain names is, well, if you are running a business and you are using the Internet to bring people to your business. Then you will need a dang domain name. Not the following:

Sities.google.com/yourdomianname

WordPress.com/yourdomianname

Or anything that comes before your domain name, except for www.

I have worked in the Internet world for a long time, and the bottom line is people don’t know what they are doing.

I would be hesitant to trust a company that doesn’t have its own domain name.

Also, be careful with what you name the domain.

Justinjenkins.info

Is my domain, and it means that it is all about me—very simple, neat,t and not hard to remember.

A domain name is an extension of you and your brand.

Please be careful where you go and what you are planning to do, including the name and the site.