What’s In A (Domain) Name?
If you have already gone through the process of choosing and legally registering your company name, then this will probably seem very familiar. Here, we will go through all of the practical considerations in choosing a domain, as well as giving you tips to create a memorable URL and avoid typing and entry errors. And, we will discuss some of the PR nightmares that can come from bad choices, to help you see what to avoid!
Your Domain Name (also known as a Web Address or URL) is your website’s address on the world wide web. Users type it into their browser and are sent directly to your website’s home page. It will probably start with www. and end with .com or .org or something similar. For instance, our website’s domain is: www.minimonsterwebsites.com
Anatomy of a Domain Name
I’m sure you recognize a domain name when you see one, but let’s break it down into three sections so that we can talk about the individual parts.
For the URL http://www.minimonsterwebsites.com:
The part before the period (www) is the Sub-Domain
The part in between the periods (minimonsterwebsites) is the Second-level Domain Name
The part after the period (com) is the Top-level Domain
If you add the Second-level Domain and the Top-level Domain together, (minimonsterwebsites.com) you can refer to them as the Root Domain.
Lots of websites share the same Top-level Domain (Amazon.com, Squarespace.com, Google.com). Different websites can also have the same Second-level Domain Name (happypuppy.com, happypuppy.net, and happypuppy.org).
But it is the Root Domain, the combination of the two, that names an individual website. The Root Domain itself usually directs to the home page of the website, and every other page on the site must technically include the same Root Domain.
The Root Domain is what differentiates one website from another. If you type in blueskunk.com, you may go to a sock manufacturer by that name. Blueskunk.org may take you to a non-profit website raising funds to save a rare European skunk species. And, blueskunk.biz could be slightly racy. We don’t know.
Top-level Domain (TLD, Domain Extension, Domain Suffix or sometimes gTLD for Generic Top-level Domain) refers to the suffix that appears at the end of a domain name.
Common examples include:
.com (commercial)
.org (non-profit organization)
.gov (government)
.net (network resources)
.edu (education)
While all of these Top-level Domains are very familiar to most, there are hundreds of TLDs to choose from. Some designate a particular country, like .uk for the United Kingdom, and there are also some bizarre ones out there, like .plumbing or .ninja or .fish.
Sub-Domains are added in front of the root domain and show further division of the website. For example, mail.minimonster.com, calendar.minimonster.com, and docs.minimonster.com would all be parts of the same domain.
One website subdomain has become so common that most modern browsers don’t even require you to type it now: www.
Waaaay back in the day, you needed to type in http://www. before any URL you entered or you would get an error message. Web browsers improved and started entering the http:// part automatically for us. Now, www. has also become an automatic default, but we humans have been trained to include it as part of a web address.
When you register a domain through Squarespace, you won’t have to worry about this at all. Your website will show up whether or not the user types in the www. If someone types your domain name into your browser without the www. they’ll be taken to your site, but the www. will appear in the address bar.
Tips for Choosing a Great Domain Name (and some tragic/comic examples of companies who didn’t.)
Deciding on your company’s name and brand? Easy! Deciding on your domain name? Now, that gets tricky. There are a lot of restrictions and much more to consider when you are looking for your web address.
Let’s start out thinking about a perfect world. The ideal that we are shooting for is exactly what we want in a company name. Your domain should be memorable, on-brand in every way, intuitively suggest what the company is or does, and hint at the company’s personality. Since we are discussing the ideal here, let’s also say that your domain should be easily understood, uncomplicated, and short and sweet.
Needless to say, neither name can legally infringe on anyone else’s corporation, offend anyone, insult anyone, slight anyone, or be disagreeable, improper, or inappropriate.
If you have already legally named your company, you recognize how pie-in-the-sky this is. It is hard enough to come up with the perfect name, but you also have to come up with an idea that nobody else has.
With your domain, we have a few other wrenches to throw in the works. There isn’t any capitalization or spacing in a URL, so if you are using multiple words, everything runs together. This affects readability and memorability. You have to choose which top-level domain to use (.com .org .ninja). And, there are keywords and SEO to consider.
It’s a lot. But we are going to walk you through all the ins and outs, and encourage you with some truly hilarious, face-palming, “how did they not see that!” examples, so you know what to avoid!
The Non-Negotiable Rules
There are some ground rules for creating a domain name anywhere on the www, and some additional Squarespace restrictions that you will need to know.
Sidebar: Who created these rules, you ask? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the global non-profit corporation that oversees the assignment of both IP addresses and domain names and bears responsibility for domain name system management and accrediting registrars. I imagine them as wizened old people sitting at a large circular table, wearing long, flowing, gold robes, and muttering “data subject pursuant to article 6, appendix A, section 4” to each other and nodding, but I’m sure that’s not entirely correct.
Rules for Creating Any Domain Name
Between 3 and 63 characters
No spaces between characters
Domains can only have letters, numbers, and hyphens/dashes (abc123-456)
No special characters or symbols (Anything that looks like Yosemite Sam cussing: !@#$%^&<,*(){}.|[]>.)
Not case sensitive (minimonsterwebsites.com and miniMonsterwebsites.com will go to the same website)
You can’t use a domain name that’s already registered to someone else
Additional Squarespace Restrictions
Squarespace domains don’t support most special alphabetical characters (such as ü, é, or ñ)
A Squarespace domain can’t have the word squarespace or sqsp in it
Squarespace will not support all TLDs. Click here to see the list of TLDs that Squarespace supports
You can’t register Premium Domains with Squarespace. Premium Domains (After-market, Pre-registered, or Secondary-market Domains) are domains that someone has previously registered and now has put back on the market to resell. (You can Connect a Premium Domain, but you can’t Register it or Transfer it to Squarespace.)
Name That Domain!
Especially in a small business where relationships and referrals are essential, your domain name will have a huge impact on your business. At this stage in the game, business is earned through one-on-one interactions and customers recommending you to their friends.
Consider how important this interaction is:
Susan: “I love those socks! Where did you get them?”
Cathy: “Oh, these are so soft and comfy. You should get a pair. I got them at the art fair last fall. The lady who makes them is the best. Her company is called Angelique Robinson’s Scrumptious Socks. I even picked up a business card for my sister.”
Susan looks at the card and sees the URL: www.angeliquerobinsonsscrumptioussocks.biz
Later that day, Susan spends five minutes at home typing in variations of Angel Roberts Silly Socks.com ... Angelica Robertson Soft Socks.com ... Angelina Robert Scrunchy Socks.com ... and then gives up and buys some cheap socks off of Amazon. Yup, I used the A-word.
Cathy’s sister may be able to type in that URL with the business card in front of her, but poor Susan never had a chance.
Let me throw some psychology at you: Processing Fluency and Retrieval Fluency are cognitive biases that all people have. We remember and have more positive associations with things that we can easily say and think about. If you can pronounce it, picture it in your mind, and easily describe it, then you are more likely to remember it. If we are confronted with too much disorder and unfamiliarity, we get overwhelmed and the ideas, words (and URLs) don’t stick.
But, what if the conversation had gone like this:
Susan: “I love those socks! Where did you get them?”
Cathy: “Oh, these are so soft and comfy. You should get a pair. I got them at the art fair last fall. The lady who makes them is the best. Her company is called Happy Toes”
Later that day, Susan remembers this conversation, types Happytoes.com into her computer and buys four hundred pairs of socks.
Sweet! So why was that last interaction so successful? The name of the company was short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and left a positive impression of the company and product. Cathy remembered it easily. When Susan got home, she remembered it too, added a .com and found her socks.
This story gives us a lot of the do’s and don’ts for a domain name.
Create A Domain That Is...
Short and Sweet
Shorter is better. The longer your domain is, the harder it’s going to be to pronounce, retain, retell, and type. All of that spells trouble for the smooth operation of your business.
A domain with fewer characters is easier to remember, recall, say, and share, which is everything that we want in a URL!
Takeaway:
Try to keep your domain under 15-20 characters, and under 4 words.
Memorable
The most important feature of either a company name or a domain is that people remember it. You have to walk a tightrope. On one side is different, distinctive, and unique, and on the other is bizarre, unpronounceable, and confusing.
Search engines are also increasingly emphasizing accessibility and usability as a ranking factor, so the easier a URL is for a person to read, the better it is for SEO.
Takeaway:
Use .com for your Top-level Domain if it’s available, because most people still use this as a default.
Don’t use hyphens unless you absolutely have to.
Stay away from numbers if you can. (does the user type in the numeral 4, or the word four?)
Avoid unusual spellings that can be mistyped.
Brandable
When you hear a brand name, it needs to provide context and personality for the company. By looking at only the brand name, a person should be able to tell what the company does, and get a read on the character or nature of the company.
When you hear a domain name, it needs to sound like the brand.
Regardless of the approach you take in your brand: serious and resolute, light and funny, accessible and straight-forward, every time you talk about your company (your messaging), you need to be consistent and clear in your voice, so your company’s personality isn’t varied.
Takeaway:
Hyphens in a domain are a problem, because they disrupt the flow. When people encounter a hyphen, they see it as out-of-the-ordinary, and tend to focus more on the hyphen than the domain name itself. Plus, hyphens don’t sound like a brand, they sound like something in a filing system.
Numbers can bring about the same problems, so they need to be used with care.
Intuitive
The perfect domain name will give your audience a good idea of what your company and website are all about. I am willing to bet that if I went to www.comfybeds.com, I would find some beds for sale. And, I’m betting that they would be comfy.
But, the internet has been around for awhile, so some may say that “All the good URLs are taken.” If your legal company name has already been registered as a .com domain, then you’ve still got some options.
• You can modify or add to the URL. Especially if you are a small company, you can get away with licensing a name that is pretty generic. That is because generally you only have to create a name that is unique in your state. There could be a shop in every state called Comfy Beds, and all of them could be different companies. All of the Comfy Beds shopkeepers are fine with that, until everyone goes looking for a URL. Then, you are competing across the English-speaking world for the same domain name. If you add a location or a descriptor to your domain, you are much more likely to find it available.
Adding a location can actually be a benefit to your business, as you are directly targeting people in your area. www.comfybedschicago.com
Adding a descriptor can help build your brand, and give you another creative way of marketing. www.comfybedsoriginal.com might stress to your audience that your business has been around for a long time. www.comfybedscheap.com might attract bed shoppers on a budget. Or, www.comfybedstoday.com could lure in the crowd that simply can not wait for their comfort.
Heads Up! No matter how you modify your domain name, if it is different from your legal business name, then lean into the modification. Get creative. Your legal business name appears on your taxes, licenses, and permits, but that doesn’t stop you from updating your business cards or signage.
Things to Watch Out For (yup - this is the funny part)
1) Take your company name
2) Remove the spaces and capitalization
3) Now make sure it still reads like your company name
4) Read it again, but think like a 13 year old boy
If our Comfy Beds Company wanted to highlight their quick turn time, they could choose:
www.comfybedsnow.com
Which, at a glance, looks like Comfy Bed Snow. That’s not what we were trying to convey.
Be wary of different words that can be pulled out of a large string of characters. Your homage website to your old VW van, www.cutevan.com, might upset Evan, the kid next door, if he reads it wrong.
When you can, present multiple-word URLs in camel-case: www.CuteVan.com to help readability.
Please, please, get several sets of eyes on your domain before you go live.
Some of the websites below have realized the mistake they made and now use this URL to redirect to a different domain. Some of them have closed up shop entirely. But there are those who don’t care what you think when you add a www. and a .com around their company name, just as long as you go to their website.
There is a company that recycles old tech named IT scrap (www.itscrap.com)
If you want to find out if someone has as an agent, go to Who Represents (www.whorepresents.com)
There is a beautiful town in California you could look up at Winters Express (www.wintersexpress.com)
A great place to get fancy clothes for your kiddos in Britain is Children’s Wear (www.childrenswear.com)
To relax and appreciate some beautiful art, pop over to Speed of Art (www.speedofart.com)
Want to trade in the polypropylene market? Go to The Plastics Exchange (www.theplasticsexchange.com)
And, if you need psychological help after this, try out Therapist in a Box (www.therapistinabox.com)
A special, heartfelt RIP to the website where everyone went to get writing utensils, Pen Island.
Numbers: Not a Good Idea
English is lousy with homophones, those words that are pronounced the same as another word but have a different meaning, and may even have a different spelling. Rain, reign, and rein all sound the same but are as different as knight and day.
For some reason, a lot of our numbers seem to carry multiple meanings.
One - Can be a numeral, a number, an individual, or a past victory. (1, One, Won)
Two - A numeral, number, preposition, or an adverb (2, Two, To, Too)
Four - A numeral, number, preposition, prefix, or a warning cry in golf (4, Four, For, Fore-, Fore!)
Ten - Depending on your dialect, you could get a numeral, number, or a metal out of this. (10, Ten, Tin)
And multiple meanings cause confusion, which is what we are trying to avoid. Should a visitor type the number two, the word two, or is it too?
Since you want your website to appeal universally, there are also numbers to avoid association with. In America, we are used to not having a 13th floor in a building, or skipping the house number 666 on a street. The number 9 in Japanese is a homophone to the word suffering, and considered extremely bad luck. In several Asian languages, the number 4 sounds very much like the word death, and is actively avoided by individuals and corporations alike. (The Japanese camera company Fuji, for example, released series 5 immediately after series 3.) Some Italians won’t speak the number 17 because it brings such bad luck. And, you aren’t going to be able to use the number 69 in conversation with a teenager without getting snickered at.
Hyphens Are a No-No
If your company name is more than one word, then your instinct may be to insert hyphens to separate the words. Please promise me that you will try to come up with a workaround to this problem.
The only time I would be comfortable justifying a hyphen in a URL is if it broke up an otherwise extremely unfortunate domain name when the legal company name had already been established. (See: Therapist Finder.com)
In general, hyphens in a domain are a problem. They decrease readability and memorability of the site, they look horribly spammy, and they sound dull, officious, and technical, and I know your brand is not any of those things.
TLD Troubles
Use .com for your Top-level Domain if it’s available.
For years, everyone who dealt with websites knew this fact. Then, in 2019, somebody actually bothered to do the research and prove it. The numbers weren’t ground-breaking or shocking, but now we have a solid study to cite when we say that .com is the most recognized and accessible TLD.
The three big takeaways from the study:
.com domains are over 33% more memorable than URLs with other top-level domains
.com is the #1 most trusted TLD
When people try to remember a URL, they’re 3.8 times more likely to assume it ends in .com than anything else.
*Study conducted by content marketing firm GrowthBadger in August and September of 2019 of 1,500 participants using the eight most common TLDs : .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, .co, .blog, and .io.
Takeaway: Use .com. If it isn’t available for the domain name you want, tweak your domain name until you find a .com that is available.
Question From Pretend Audience: Can’t we just use .net or .biz?
mini Monster Answer: Don’t. If someone has already registered the domain www.yourcompany.com, and you opt to register www.yourcompany.net, you are going to lose a huge chunk of your audience to the .com site. People simply use .com as a default when they are looking for something.
Question From Pretend Audience: Are there any times when it is OK to use a TLD other than .com?
mini Monster Answer: Of course. If you are creating a website for a non-profit, use .org. If you are developing an educational site, use .edu.
Now, for the exception that makes the rule, let’s discuss the craziness that started happening back in 2014. The venerable ICANN became concerned that the world would run out of names for websites, and so they added over 500 top-level domains. These were genuinely meant to increase accessibility, and open up new neighborhoods on the internet with things like .shop, .wedding, and .recipes. The idea made perfect sense, but the general public was not impressed. Almost a decade later, these new TLDs are still generally unknown.
If you are willing to make whatever comes after the dot in your domain name a major part of your brand, then these may be for you. You will have to do more than just incorporate it into your company’s name and brand, you will need to celebrate it. Remember the old TV commercial for Expedia that had an acapella group singing Dot Com! at the end? Let that be your guide on how to incorporate this.
Squarespace doesn’t support all the wacky TLDs (check out the list of what they do support here ), but if you are feeling it, then you can register a domain with:
.band
.beer
.coffee
.fun
.love
.ninja
.pizza
.rocks
.rodeo
.surf
Fraternal Twin Domains?
There are a few instances that you might want to buy and register more than one domain for your website. For a small business, it boils down to two reasons: legal protection or preventing user error.
Don’t get flustered, we aren’t talking about creating multiple websites, just directing multiple domains to the one magnificent website that you are building.
Legal
Protection of Brand
If you are a billion dollar industry, you might do well to buy up all the iterations of your domain, including all of the TLDs possible. But I’m going to jump to the conclusion that you aren’t, and even though domains don’t cost a lot, twenty bucks is still twenty bucks. If you are purchasing the .com version of your domain and want to make sure that nobody buys the .net version to steal some of your business, fair enough. But that may be as far as you need to take it.Trademark Protection
Even if you have a trademark, servicemark, or patent for your company or the product or service that your company offers, the domain name isn’t yours unless you register it. It’s a good habit to purchase all of the relevant domains while you are completing the paperwork securing any federal protection.
User Error
Your website will be visited by humans, and humans can mishear, misread, mistype, and misspell. But, you still want to make sure that your audience finds you when they come looking.
If you have a business name or a word in your domain name that people frequently misspell, you may want to purchase domains based on those misspellings. That will help your visitors get to you, instead of reaching an error page or (gasp!) a competitor’s page.
Quick Checks
When naming your domain, keep an eye and ear out for:
Similar sounding or similarly spelled domains
www.besticetea.com
www.besticedtea.com
Misunderstandings of what your domain name is when they hear it
A domain for prima donna ballerinas, could be heard as pre-Madonna ballerinas.
Common misspellings or alternative spellings of your company’s name
McArthur, MacArthur
Words in your domain name that are commonly misspelled
e.g. Jewelry is often misspelled Jewelery
Again, we aren’t trying to capture every possible misspelling or fat-fingering accident, just the obvious and re-occurring errors.
If your domain name contains any homophones (especially numbers), try to register alternate domains that you see as trouble-makers.
love2knit.com
lovetoknit.com
lovetwoknit.com
If you have a word in your domain that is just there for the grammar or because it is part of your company name, it’s smart to pick up a simplified version of the domain in case your visitors leave it out.
thebestcars.com
bestcars.com
Even if your legal company name is long, unwieldy, and difficult, still buy the .com domain for it if you can. Then, look into buying a shortened version for your website, presentations, ads, etc.
JTHBlawfirm.com can be used alone with
JacksonTylerHopkinsBoydLawFirm.com
Remember that people may not always refer to your company by it’s official name.
Coca-Cola.com and Coke.com both take you to the same website.
Personal story time! When we decided on the name mini Monster Websites, we tried it out on colleagues and friends. We discovered that later on in conversation, people had a tendency to refer to the company name as both mini Monster and mini Monsters. So, we bought two domains. Both www.miniMonsterWebsites.com and www.miniMonstersWebsites.com will take you to our site.
Also, SEO
Having more than one domain for your business can also improve your page rankings in search engine results if it is done in a particular way.
Any additional domain names for your business should be redirected to your primary landing page using what is called a 301 redirect. Here you are permanently redirecting any secondary domains you purchase to your primary domain. With redirects, all of the rankings from the secondary domains to your primary one will boost overall rankings in search.
According to SEO.com, when creating a Robots.txt file and an XML sitemap so that search engines can index your site more easily, including 301 redirects from multiple purchased domains to a singular destination makes it even easier for your site to be indexed properly. Google will not penalize you for duplicate content with this redirect.
Let’s Talk About SEO
Uproar From Pretend Audience: Seriously? I have to address SEO in my domain?
mini Monster Responsee: This is more of a caution than a recommendation.
You used to be able to find websites with domains like www.where-to-find-the-best-bargain-prices-on-cars-in-jersey.com. This madness was started by people who wanted to stuff every keyword they could into their domain, in the hopes of boosting their rankings.
But, The Google is all-seeing and ever-evolving. Google has picked up on the fact that keyword-stuffed domains like these often have low-quality content, and so the algorithm has been de-prioritizing these sites, and even viewing them with a negative bias.
So, if you are using a keyword or two in your domain name, use it in the old-school way. Think about what word would help explain your business to a human who is looking for what you offer. Don’t worry about search engines and algorithms.
