Guide to choosing a domain name

Introduction
This short guide aims to assist you in choosing a domain name for you or your business.

Recognizable
Your domain name is the key to your Internet presence and should, therefore, be recognizable, easy to remember and relate to you, your business name, brand, product, service or activities.

Intuitive
When users search the Internet for a particular product or service they often search for the name of the product or service they desire, rather than for a business name. To increase the chances of them finding your web site, you may wish to register a domain name based on your products or services, either instead of or in addition to one based on your business or company name.

Make it short
Short names are easier to remember and quicker to type.

Location
The most common domain names for business use are still .coms. Therefore, we recommend that you register the .com version of your chosen name even if all of your business is located in your own country. We also recommended that you give serious consideration to registering other domain names, in particular, .biz, .info and .net and your own country domain, for example, .co.uk. All of your domain names can "point" to the same web site and email account if you so wish.

Format
The rules for the formats of domain names vary from country to country, but in general, domain names need to be between 3 and 60 characters long (excluding suffix). They may contain letters and numbers but no punctuation other than hyphens. (Neither the first nor last character of a domain name may be a hyphen). Domains names are not case sensitive and the normal convention is to use lower case letters.

We recommend that you keep your domain name as simple as possible, preferably shorter than 20 characters.

What about spaces?
Domain names may not include spaces. Hyphens are often used to represent spaces. So, if your business or brand name contains two words, for example, Chris Curnow, you might choose to register both chriscurnow.com and chris-curnow.com to protect your brands and make your web site easier to find.

Trademarks
When you apply to register a domain name no check is carried out by the registry to see if the domain name might infringe another company's name or trademark. If you do register a domain name which infringes another company's name or trademark then they may take action to have the domain name transferred to them.

Too late?
If your chosen name has already been registered, you may wish to try one based on a slogan, brand name, acronym or even a telephone number! Creative names can be very effective.

A domain name for me
The UK domain name registry offers domain names for individuals, with the suffix .me.uk. A single one of these domain names could easily be used by a whole family. For example, if you register the domain name 'curnow.me.uk' you could have multiple email addresses in the form name@curnow.me.uk. You could even have multiple web site addresses in the form www.name.curnow.me.uk.

Further information
To find out more, explore our web site, send us an email to domains@cornwallinternet.com or telephone us on +44 (0)1736 710530.

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