Thinking About Domain Names
I’ve been doing some reviewing here, going over my list of domain names (i have about 20 of them, just to put our discussion in perspective). It is time to get each and every one of them pulling its own weight … and I plan to buy a few more in the near future as well.
My friend Brendon wrote an update on his blog which taught me a couple facts I didn’t know about about .au (Australian) domain names and the piece got me thinking about some specialized (Tld CC) (Top Level Domain name Country Code) URls that I see on a daily basis and which serve as good object lessons in what you all should be thinking about any time you are thinking about a domain name, new or old.
As an America I naturally default to plain and simple .com names for all my domains. If I was really in love with a certain keyword or keyword phrase that wasn’t available as a .com I might consider a .net or .org version, but I would only make such a purchase realizing upon going in that my value would be limited to 10% or so of the .com name’s potential, so it would have to be really, really profitable or the .com owner would have to be doing a really, really poor job before i would even think about it.
Now there is a US-specific Tld CC for the United States … .us I think about .0001% of the website owners in the US perhaps use it … I really would be interested in one if you gave it to me, unless it perhaps helped spell something like the eponymous but really hard to type social bookmarking site, http://del.icio.us/.
Virtually nothing that I would build online would be limited to US-only customers, so there’s almost never a reason for me to think about excluding the rest of the web population from my offerings.
Now some other countries, often for reasons I can’t fathom seem to operate in exactly the reverse manner. In the Philippines, for example, the country where I currently live, .com URL’s cost the same as they do in the US … that is from about $6 a year on up. Country code specific addresses (.ph for the Philippines) cost the regular buyer abut $35 USD per year … quite a hefty tariff and one that Filipinos, who can afford to, seem all to eager to pay. I guess national pride is worth something, but let me give you a concrete examples about why jingoistic pride often runs counter to e-commerce.
The Philippines, like most countries, has an active Department of Tourism. Like other tourism efforts they discovered the web some time back. Did they establish the site ‘www.Philippines.com’ to take advantage of the most common "type in" web address people are likely to use to find out information about the Philippines?
No, not hardly. That address exists today as a one page MFA (made For AdSense) site which probably makes a small income for the owner, but is hardly the highest and best purpose of the site name at all. Did they register the next most common type-in name for strangers looking for the Philippines, www.philippines.ph 9after all, they, the government, directly control who can and can not own .ph URL’s.
Nape, they left that to a commercial business processing outsource company in Manila to scarf up.
What they did do was come up with a pretty catchy sounding tourism slogan to interest people in learning more about the Philippines and perhaps visiting here . "Wow Philippines". Not bad as slogans go. What domain did they register? hmm … www.wowphilippines.com.ph . Great idea … lousy execution. To people already living in the Philippines, typing .ph at the end of an address is fairly natural, although and extra step. But this is an international tourism campaign … they aren’t trying to get Filipinos to learn about their own country, they are trying to attract visitors from around the world.
How many people in the US, in the UK, Germany, France or any other country are going to sit down and search out the Tld CC, .ph, for the Philippines in order to get themselves to a sales pitch page? I mean, did you know that .ph was for the Philippines off the top of your head before you started reading this post? Of course you didn’t.
I’ve got some more to say about this subject, but people don’t like overly long posts, so I am going to wind this one up with an object lesson right now and then post again on the subject.
What do you think is being done with the very logical www.wowphilippines.com domain, the one you would get if you neglected, or didn’t know you had to add on the extra .ph for the Philippines country code?
Did you already type it in and see? Yep, it’s a very successful commercial e-commerce site … and not only does it get traffic in its own right, every time the government of the Philippines spends money top advertise their successful "Wow Philippines" tourism campaign, www.wowphilippines.com gets free traffic, simply because the original planners refused to realize that the ‘Net is international and must be made simple … not nationalistic and complicated just to prove a point.
When you think about a URL, keep simplicity and universality in mind … don’t try to maker your users do something you want them to do … make things work the way they expect it to … e-commerce is not the place to show off your control freak tendencies.
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