A domain name is often the first interaction people have with your website. In the early days of the internet everywhere you turned there seemed to be a ‘.com’ website staring back at you, if you had .com attached to your name it seemed to signify a certain ‘kudos’ to your website, it seemed to make it bigger and better somehow……
The .com tag seemed to hold precedence for many years, this was very much reflected in the price tag attached to it by domain sellers! In the last couple of years I have seen an emergence of many different available TLD’s (Top Level Domain), it seems that there is a TLD to suit almost any activity going on online and one to suit almost any type of website. It’s a great time to have your own website as the options open to you (in terms of the marketability of your TLD) seem to be almost endless. Another benefit of such an open market for TLD’s is that you can find one to suit whatever budget you are on in terms of the development of your website. The price of a TLD roughly reflects the popularity and ‘pull’ of the name but no longer truly reflects the commercial weight of the TLD (for example, twitch.tv is a huge video streaming website but the TLD is not one you would commonly associate with a website with such a huge pull). According to DomainTools .com is still the most popular TLD (over 138 million registered TLD’s) with other more popular options having much lower numbers (.net around 14 million, .org around 10 million).
So with so many options which TLD should you choose? Choose the right one for you of course! Put simply your TLD can say a lot about your website before a visitor has even entered onto your page, its right to choose a TLD that reflects on what your website is about, what you are hoping to achieve with your website and maybe a point towards the type of content your website focuses upon. As mentioned in the title, it’s likely that as a smaller website owner your content is centred around a particular topic or subject and a .com TLD may make your website sound too general (and be expensive to purchase)…….if your website centres around your artwork it may be worth going with a ‘.art’ TLD or a ‘.design’ TLD to make it stand out. Using our website as an example, I decided to go with .me.uk as I am based in the UK and felt that the .me prefix added a certain warmth and less corporate feel to my website! A good friend of mine is a blogger and uses a ‘co.uk’ domain, they may have been better going with a ‘.blog’ TLD but again this is more of an opinion on my part and is totally at the discretion of the website owner! If you are looking to shorten your URL (e.g. myveryawesomeblog.com) a good shout is to consider what TLD you chose to use (myveryawesomeblog.com can easily become myveryawesome.blog). Not only does this shorten your URL but also points back to you as a blogger and will hopefully draw visitors to your from a search engine (and sounds more memorable).
Did you know?
The domain .tv is the Internet Country code top-level domain for the country Tuvalu, it draws in around 10% of the gross GDP for the country due to the fact that .tv is associated with the word television rather than the fact it is the code for Tuvalu. This has the beneficial effect of making the domain profitable thus producing an indirect income for Tuvalu.
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