How to Select a Domain Name for your organization:

Selecting a domain is an important step for any company, from brick and mortar shops to completely online ventures.  There has been much press about the lack of domains available and rapid rate of registration however there are still hundreds of thousands of excellent domains which have yet to be registered.

When selecting a domain it is important to think why the domain name system exists in the first place.  It is there to map computer friendly IP addresses such as 154.52.254.25 to human friendly names such as yourcompany.com.  You should think about human friendly names when making your selection.  Here are some pitfalls that should be avoided:

• Avoid names which can be easily confused with other names.  You don't want to have users struggling to get to your site or even worse, ending up at a competitors.  An example of this pitfall would be a company that registers buy4less.com when another company already has buyforless.com.  If you are registering a name that would be easily confused with other names consider registering these names as well or better yet, register a name which can not be easily confused with other names in the first place.
   
• In addition to avoiding confusion with other sites you must ensure that your site can be typed phonetically.  This means if you tell someone your domain name over the phone they should be able to easily type it without you having to spell the entire domain.  An example pitfall in this case would be a domain like online-sales.com where you have to say the hyphen or they would not reach your site.
   
• Another pitfall is selecting names which can not be easily typed or are difficult to spell. This includes words that sound different than they spell or domains which use words that have multiple common spellings.

You can learn a lot from the most popular sites on the internet today such as yahoo, amazon, and google.  These companies domains are short, easy to type and easy to remember.