1. Take advantage of single letters and numbers. Bah. Surely you know of this already. Free4u.com is a domain that is simple and easy to type. While that may look good in writing/typing, it is when you have to spread the domain name via word of mouth that the horror begins. I can only imagine the effort it takes to explain to another person, “no, not ‘for’, but the number four… oh, you mean freefouryou.com?… no, the number four… you know, the character four that you draw with three lines… three? you said it was four….“
2. Take advantage of subdomains. It’s so easy for many web sites to implement this technique. Case in point — del.icio.us. Or, my Blog of Rugrats, which is mainly a blog about my babies, may get away with having a cute domain name like ba.byblogging.com. I know, it kind of sounds awkward at first, but so did Del.icio.us, Google.com, and Wikipedia.com at one time or another. The more important thing is what you do with the site and how you brand them that matter in the end.
3. Take advantage of Internationalised Domain Names or IDNs. Who needs those boring domains like lorna.com or lorna.net when you can get a groovier domain name like lor.na? In fact, I really would have registered for lor.na if Namibian domain names weren’t so expensive. Like approximately USD385.00 expensive. But that’s beside the point. Checking out different international domain names can be fun and may even help you out in branding your web site more prominently than others.
Check out my other posts: « 3 guidelines for selecting paid blogging assignments / I joined the Entrecard bandwagon »
Definitely agree with you. We have trouble when we give out our domain name because homes is plural. I could only imagine how hard it would be to explain a “4” instead of a “for”.
I agree that having to explain the ‘4’ does get to be tiresome….
‘Is it four as in the number or the number 4?’
Nice post, but I really hate domains like delicious, I can never spell it properly and it takes me like two hours to figure out whats wrong.
I work for a company that has a number in the domain name, and trust me, it’s terrible. It’s actually a really simple (5 character) domain name, but no one ever knows if they should spell the number or type the numbers. I’m still not sure why the owner doesn’t own both versions.
I like the idea of mixing up names within IDNs, how do the search engines find those?