Your domain name, or web address, is the online identity of your business. It serves as a summary in your users' minds of your entire corporate identity. Careful choice of your domain name is therefore very important, if not mission critical.

In this article, we offer a few tips based on our own observations and experience.

• Shorter domain names are - generally speaking - to be preferred over longer ones, but not at the expense of meaning. RiversideRestaurant.com is much better than RRest.com. Riverside.com would be less descriptive but more prestigious. It's a difficult balancing act.
  
  
• Your TLD (Top Level Domain) is the bit of your domain name after the dot, and it is more important than most people realize.
  
  
  • The three original gTLDs (generic TLDs) - .com, .net and .org - are still the most widely recognized, by some considerable margin. Dot.com is to be preferred for most commercial sites. Using .org for such a site is simply unprofessional. Dot.net is a useful alternative to .com but we would strongly suggest that it is most appropriate for network or portal-style sites. Also, to avoid confusion with the much more common .com, we would suggest trying to only have a very simple word before the dot. For example, wrestling.net is a very good domain name, but prowrestling.net is too difficult to remember for many people.
    
    
  • Several new gTLDs were released in 2002. The only new gTLD that has gained any form of acceptability is .info, and only for sites offering a lot of free information, or else it looks unprofessional. It is also difficult to find a .info address that has the correct syntax. For example, people talk about wanting hotel info, not hotels info, so while hotels.info may attract more traffic for the highly-searched hotels keyword, it will always seem a little ungrammatical to linguistic purists!
    
    
  • We do not recommend .biz. The shorthand biz just means business in some countries, but has rather diminutive or even vulgar connotations in others!
    
    
  • The two-letter country code TLDs (ccTLDs) are virtually unused in some countries (.us for USA) but are very popular, perhaps even more popular than .com, in others (.fr for France). Some of the ccTLDs are marketed as something other than what they really are - for example .ws (Western Samoa - website) and .tv (Tuvalu - television). For the most part, we consider this to be gimmicky and unprofessional.
    
    
• There are a variety of good tools to help you find unregistered domain names, and it is a fallacy, even as we're writing this, in September 2003, to say that all the good names are gone. Just take your time! Our favorite domain finding tool is Whois Source. Consider setting up a free account there so that you can search for expired domains; these are domains which have been previously registered and then not renewed. They are often of a higher quality than domains which have never before been registered.
  
  
• Do not overpay for your domain name registration. You should be able to pay under $9/year. (Bizarrely, some registrars charge up to $35/year!) There are only minor differences in the levels of service between different domain registrars. We operate and recommend the namiac! registrar, which charges only $8.75/year and, as a GoDaddy reseller, offers amongst the highest levels of service in the industry.
  
  
• If you know what domain name you want, but it is already taken in your chosen TLD, don't automatically select a lesser TLD. See if there's a corporate site at the domain, and if not examine the whois (registrant) record carefully. All may not be lost! Consider emailing the current registrant to see if they would consider selling you the registration rights. This can be deeply frustrating if it's simply not for sale, or if a ridiculous price is quoted, but bargains can be had. For example, we paid only $500 for the TEMPLATES.NET domain. The seller was happy and we were ecstatic!