Companies spend millions on branding. They painstakingly craft just the right logo, slogan, taglines, colors, letterhead, and countless other big and small details, hoping to get a slight name-recognition advantage in a super-competitive marketplace.
It would be hard to deny that most of that effort centers on the name of the enterprise. Naming is hugely important across all your marketing platforms, especially your online presence. Your Domain Name is no exception.
People can get weird when it comes to names.
Germany has a set of specific regulations governing what you are allowed to name your child. It has to indicate gender and not be the name of a product or in some way affect the person negatively.
So that's why there are no Germans named Dopey McLowenbrau.
Icelandic names are limited by the Personal Names Register to around 1800 per gender.
Here in the land of the free, we've come up with some doozies. There are at least five people running around with the first name "Zzyzx," after a remote town in California. http://www.ebabynames.com/zzyzx-most-bizarre-name
We personally know a little girl in our neighborhood named "Kay-i-dee." Get it? K-I-D?
Name That Domain
One of the first things we learned as infants was our name, then the names of the adults who generously proffered as much food and attention as we wanted. "Mama" and "Dada" then taught us that EVERYTHING has a name- that's how we differentiate one thing from another. Skip to the present day and we find that there's a significant industry springing up around naming chunks of the internet. Searching for "Online Marketing Savannah GA" returns a number of companies all with unique names for their web address or URL (universal resource locator).
You can interact with them, rearrange, duplicate, tell them to do something, and as soon as you direct your computer or phone to look for a new address, a completely different set of information appears, brought to you by completely different one-and-zero storage devices.
Domain Name Anatomy
Anyway… Here's how a domain name works. Look up at the address window at the top of this page. You'll see a string of letters and symbols like this:
http://www.unitedwebworks.com/blog
"HTTP" is your computer or phone's way of saying, "Hi, internet-connected information storage units out there! I'm about to ask you for some stuff in the language of HTTP." Sometimes your browser shows the HTTP and sometimes it has no need to.
The colon (:) is just a separator between HTTP and what's next
The two slashes (//) means that you are looking for a server (a computer or an array of memory storage devices) that sits there waiting to dispense information when summoned. Yes, like a butler with a bottle of ketchup in his hand.
"www" is the designation used for a server that is online for the purpose of interacting with other computers.
Then comes the fun part! "unitedwebworks" is the unique name that we chose for our company more than 10 years ago. Of course we named our own slice of the internet after our company! This name focuses your search for content down to that which was created and / or stored by a single entity, in this case United WebWorks, inc.
Let's suppose your name is John Brown and you want a website featuring your own moniker as the domain name. A quick check tells you that johnbrown.com, johnbrown.net, and johnbrown.org are not available.
But as you look at the other options offered by the domain registration company, you see that johnbrown.rocks is available. Grab it, register it and it's all yours for as long as you pay the nominal registration fee.
Wait, Domain Name Registration Company? Yes. There are a lot of them out there. They act as retail stores for names. Sometimes individuals or small companies will snap up a new name, plus all the possible misspellings of the name and sit on them until the demand is high enough to sell.
It can be pretty exciting for the guy who registered "HappyFresh.com" which recently sold at auction for $13,500. If only we had kept that silly "apple.com" domain!
Where does one acquire their very own Domain Name? One site we recommend is YourDomainPick.com. It's a one-stop all-inclusive registrar with great customer service. You can pick up a domain name with all the trimmings including a website builder, web hosting space, security levels, and email accounts. If you do online marketing Savannah GA, or anywhere else, Check it out here:
Be careful with those domain names, though. You don't want to end up like these folks writing to
http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a1013451/strange-but-true-names:
"I know twins called Sam and Ella..." -Kat
"There are triplets in my area called Faith, Hope, and…wait for it…Kevin." -Kate
"I had a teacher at school called Robin Graves." -Francesca
And our personal favorite: Malice Green, who it turns out was not nearly as malicious as the police officers that did him in. At least he had a heroic prosecutor named Kym Worthy!
Still, why did Mrs. Green ever agree to name her baby "Malice?"
http://law.jrank.org/pages/3568/Malice-Green-Beating-Death-Trials-1993-2000.html