A few years ago one of the funniest stories on the internet was of Powergen’s Italian subsidiary that had registered the highly amusing domain name www.powergenitalia.com for their company.  I was reminded of this when, last weekend, I made an even more embarrassing discovery.

In this case the South Wales IT supplier ‘Gryphon IT Solutions Ltd’ had registered the deeply unfortunate www.welshit.co.uk.

I’ve been asked many times to help people choose company domain names and occasionally for personal sites too.  The most recent of these was a hairdressing academy called ‘Embrace’.  Their idea was to register www.embracehairdressingacademy.com which would have been a bad mistake.

Why?  The name they were think of was too long.  A domain name should be short, catchy and memorable.  For these reasons I suggested www.embracehair.com.  This domain is catchy, memorable and also has several different meanings.

Then what TLD do you need?  The TLD (Top Level Domain) is the suffix that comes at the end of your domain name, .com, .co.uk etc.  It matters less and less now.  Usually for business, being able to register both the .com and .co.uk is a good thing but more and more business are also not registering the .biz and .info TLDs which are perfectly good.  This one depends on which you feel is best for your company.

You shouldn’t jump into taking the first domain name that springs to mind.  These things are worth taking some time over.  You should spend some time at a domain registrar such as www.godaddy.com or www.speednames.net (the two I use) and try some different variations out.  One of things that will probably come from this is that you’ll have other different ideas during the process.