So you need a Domain Name?
If you need a domain name for your business, personal business venture or you want to invest in a domain name for a future entreprenurial venture or other purpose, there are a number of items you should consider.
First, you will want to make sure your domain name is memorable and high-impact. Try to stay away with including hyphens in your domain or numbers as this decreases the value of your domain and makes it increasingly difficult for your customers to recall. Also, although domain names can be up to 256 characters in length, long domain names have like consequences and reduces the likeliness of your customers to type in the domain into their web browser if they didn’t find you on the web and could otherwise click on a link.
Try to secure all top level domain (TLDs) suffixes such as .com, .net and .org for your business, especially if you believe you have a solid business idea. Your competitors might try to grab alternate domain name suffixes or you might have unscrupulous ‘investors’ who see your business thrive, register the names and then try to ‘blackmail’ you in a sense by refusing to transfer the name to you without paying a large sum — in the past these people have even gone so far as to setup a placeholder page or small site with pornography, leftiest or far-right political messages, etc. to try to leverage their goals in this end. If you own a trademark (and I suggest you at least register your trademark on the state level, if not a federal trademark through the USPTO) — you have some legal recourse through intellectual property (IP) lawyers and perhaps the domain’s registrar such as GoDaddy’s legal department or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can provide you with some assistance as they are the governing body for all registrars.
To search for a domain name, go to a domain registrar’s web site to see if it is available. You can go to other domain search sites but there is no saying on whether available names are flagged by these sites – an alert mechanism in other words – that lets the Webmaster know a top quality domain is up for grabs. That’s why I tend to always do domain research on a major domain registration web site such as GoDaddy.com because I doubt they have such a mechanism in place and even if they did, their business plan requires them to focus on other areas so there would be very limited resources situated for this endevour… and they would also be bound to ICANN’s rules and regulations which may actually prevent them from doing this. Slight tangent… but an important item to get across as I have had a few excellent available domains ‘stolen’ from me when I did not act fast enough to register them while researching on smaller domain name availablility checker sites and/or WHOIS tools.
When searching for a domain, you might want to pull up the following web sites to assist with your search:
- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) web site at www.uspto.gov to determine if a name is registered as a trademark, to avoid a potential legal dispute down the road (suggest you query plurals, hyphens, spaces, etc. where appropriate and like-sounding names).
- Thesaurus.com — because most likely your domain name is taken, but you can use this site to help generate similar words to generate a new creative trademark/domain name. GoDaddy’s domain name search area lists suggestions for you as well but the best alternatives generally would come from you vs. an automated suggestion system for alternatives.
- Google.com (or similar search engine) — suggest you use this to query words associated with your domain name to determine popularity, possible trademark infringement not found through USPTO’s tool — if someone didn’t register their mark with the federal registrar, etc.)
If you plan on registering a large amount of domain names (and registering names can be quite addictive to some), GoDaddy.com offers a Domain Discount Club where you pay X amount for a subscription allowing you to take advantage of “rock bottom” prices for new domain name registrations and renewals for many domain suffixes. Example: as of this article entry, a .com registration would cost only $6.85/yr plus possible ICANN fees which make this a few cents extra. Suggest you weigh pros and cons subscribing to this service however because it may only make sense if you plan on maintaining ~100 domain names/yr or so.
A few other domain tools you may wish to explore can be found at www.domaintools.com — I will attempt to go into some detail on the various tools available for you to use here in a later article. Their WHOIS tool specifies whether a domain name has been registered before, based upon their historical WHOIS information.
A few of the most popular domain name registrars:
- GoDaddy – www.godaddy.com
- eNom – www.enom.com
- Register.com – www.register.com
This article is more of a brief synopsis of domain name crafting — you may also want to review registrar web sites as many of them expand upon the above and provide you with supplemental information you may find helpful with this process. Might also find information on creating trademarks useful via a Google search.
