Key questions

Domainoo provides answers to the 4 key questions in the field of domain name. These answers are only intended to provide information. Please contact us for more elaborate information and to seek personal advice from our team.

Question No 1 – What is a domain name?

A domain name is a name representing your company/brand, or more generally your identity.

A domain name is linked to an Internet address (IP) consisting now of 4 numbers (ex : 111.22.333.44), to be soon extended to 6, identifying the machine on the network. The domain name is a textual translation of this Internet address and thus can be remembered more easily by your interlocutors (ex: domainoo.com as a textual translation of the IP 62.4.78.163).

As an example, domainoo.com, thename.com and domainoo.pro are domain names.

A domain name may be used as an address of an Internet website (www.mysite.fr) but also as a basis for email boxes (contact@mysite.fr).

The domain name is composed of an extension (called TLD), for instance .com, .fr or .eu, the domain name itself such as “domainoo” and sub-domains such as www, webmail, extranet, etc. A domain name may include several levels of sub-domains, always separated by dots “.” (ex: dev.extranet.domainoo.com). To enable access to an Internet website the complete address is thus composed of the (http://) prefix, the sub-domain(s) (ex:www), the domain name proper and its extension, for instance http://www.domainoo.com.

Question No 2 – Why register a domain name?

Nowadays Internet has become an essential communication tool, for companies and brands as well as for individuals. Internet is a communication tool enabling a company, an organization, an association or an individual to make efficiently known its activities, products, projects or services and by the same token to value its name or its brand with the Internet website and a domain name.

The Internet website is a 24/24, 7/7 open showcase. It is a usually cheap communication tool allowing to inform, sell, attract, gather, etc. However, in order to be easily consulted and remembered, your Internet website must have a well-designed name and a coherent extension (.fr for a French audience, .info for an information website), hence the relevance of the domain name.

Acquiring a domain name enables you to:

• bring a professional dimension to an Internet website (much more than would a personalized webpage on the server of an internet service provider, ex : mypersonalpage.free.fr), tidy up and dynamize your image;
• be easily recognized; a domain name may have the same weight as a brand for users ; people would for instance refer to ‘voyages-sncf’ rather than the ‘website of the SNCF’;
• acquire an international visibility with a view to gain new potential customers (abroad in particular) and thus improve one’s position on the market.

Question No 3 – How to choose the right domain name?

Choosing a domain name is an important step to create one’s own identity on the Internet. To this end it is worth following a few simple rules. Once the domain name is filed and the website registered, it becomes very difficult to change them.

• Syntax and spelling

Letters from a to z (without accents) are allowed, as well as numbers from 0 to 9 and dashes. Other signs may only be allowed for specific extensions and are only rarely known and used by French users for instance. They are however more in use among the German public.

A domain name should be easy to memorize, read and write. Long domain names or with ambiguous spellings should thus be avoided as much as possible.

Your domain name should ideally consist in one or two words. If more words are needed, try to separate them with dashes (-). This will improve the search engine optimization. You can alternatively link them in a way easy to remember (ex: a sentence like howthis works.com).

• Key-word or brand domain name

Unless you dedicate a substantial communication budget to advertise for the content of the website linked to your domain name, it is in your interest to choose a domain name mentioning the topic of your website. Two series of solutions are possible.

- Choose a domain name which contains key-words related to your activity. This will increase your accessibility by internet users and facilitate the classification of the site after the key-words included in its domain name. Visitors will immediately know what your website deals with by reading the domain name, which may make you gain a few more visitors.

- Choose a domain name that represents your brand. When looking for a brand or shop website, many internet users’ first reaction is to type the name of the brand or shop in the URL toolbar (ex: marks and spencer). If you exist as a brand or a reference name , not registering these domain names involves a risk to lose visitors and that the domain names be used fraudulently by cyber squatters or competitors.

Compromise : even if your domain name is generally your brand’s, product’s or company’s name it may be worth registering also generic names reflecting your sector of activity. If internet users don’t know your brand, products or company yet, buying a domain name related to your activity may indeed help them finding and consulting your website. You can also make your brand name coexist with a key-word of your sector of activity (ex: mybrand-transportation.co.uk).

• Space for my domain name

Your domain name will exist among thousands of other names that have been registered and are sometimes being used in several languages, countries, sectors. In order not to be on a saturated market you have to make sure that your domain name does not violate others’ intellectual property rights or that it may not be confused with existing brands or websites.

• .com, .fr, .eu, ... ?

Before filing your domain name, and insofar as you do not intend to protect it with regard to all existing extensions (over 250), you have to determine which extension(s) you wish to choose. The choice will be determined by the location of your market (targeted country(ies)) or the type of the contemplated website.

Generic extensions may help get positioned. For example, you may use the .info extension if you offer information; .org if you are an association; .mob if you wish to be read on cell phones; and .com which by definition is the extension of a commercial website that is not linked to any country in particular. This is the most favoured extension; with over 80 million domain names registered under it, it becomes more and more difficult to find an available name.

The .eu community extension may be interesting if you wish to sell in several European countries from the launching of your website, even if you start your business in only one of the 27 Member States. This extension provides you with a European community dimension and can circulate the image of a multinational, multilingual firm and thus facilitate your access to some markets in the future.

Extensions linked with each country (.co.uk, .de, .fr, etc) should be preferred if you intend to trade in one single country. Internet users tend indeed to type their national extension before all.

It is important to well choose one’s main extension and to define one’s strategy with regard to advantages and drawbacks of each of other possible registering combinations.

You could choose for instance a .com extension and at the same time protect the name under other extensions in order to prevent cybersquatting, and those extensions will redirect the internet user to the main website. You can also establish one website per country with the extension corresponding to the language used on the website (for example .es for a website in Spanish) and keeping an international reference website.

Question No 4 – How to manage one’s domain name well?

Protecting one’s own identity does not limit itself to registering a domain name. As has been seen in the previous point, if you wish to be visible on the web you certainly need to protect your domain name under various extensions, but also approaching names or word declensions.

Should you not wish to invest in a significant portfolio of domain names, you will need to keep an eye on the filings of domain names similar to yours. You could indeed find competitors positioned on domain names similar to yours or cyber squatters diverting your customers or potential visitors from your website. The costs of procedures of domain name retrieval often prove more expensive than an extended portfolio of domain names. The latter thus usually provides an efficient protection.

Therefore, for an efficient management of one’s own domain name or pool of domain names it is necessary to:

• ensure one’s subscriptions prolongation : a late renewal may result in a loss of the name or, should the name be reactivated, a loss in filing;
• display one’s own name in line with the intended use of internet: country extension, approaching names, word declensions;
• monitor one’s own identity in order to avoid discomfiture: audit performing, vigil to approaching names.

Domainoo assists you in all these steps and helps you rationalize your domain names portfolio.