Don Cameron wrote:

> Very few people nowadays go through the mental process of "OK, now if I type
> quantas.com.au (or is that qantas.com.au?), I might find what I am after"...
> what they do is click "Home" (because 9 out of 10 people set a Search Engine
> as their homepage), and type "Qantas Australia". They know they will get a
> selection of matches offering far more choice than by typing single
> repetitive entries into the URL box.

...

> Am I miles off the mark? - interested in your thoughts.

and by doing so injected a large dose of sanity on an otherwise poor day.
Thankyou.

Unless you are prepared to stump up a huge chunk of conventional marketing
dollars to get your domain name continuously in front of eyeballs/ears in a
catchy way, a 'good' domainname is worth a lot less than it might once have
been, and if you're going to spend that sort of cash, ANYTHING can become a
well-remembered name. As someone pointed out a few weeks ago, who would have
figured 'yahoo' as a 'good' name (whatever your personal definition of 'good'
might be).

Time was, before money sullied the picture, domain names were sought after for
coolness by length - shorter was better - hence sun.com, hp.com, 3com.com,
abc.com etc. The reason - the Web didn't exist (HTTP wasn't invented), and
neither did search engines, so domain names HAD to be easy to remember, and
short to type. These days, a short, easy to type domain name is much less
important, because of the existance of GUIs and search engines and categorised
directories - and because of it, almost any domain name will do, provided your
web-pages are listed on the most popular search engines/directories and include
good keywords. For a concrete example, take Nortel - they used to use domain
name 'nt.com', but have changed to 'nortelnetworks.com'. Has this hurt them in
any way? Nope - to find Nortel, and save worrying if its www.nt.com,
www.nortelnetworks.com, www.nortel.com, or any of the .net or other
permutations, I expect most people click once to Google (insert your favourite),
type 'nortel' and click twice - its actually less 'keystrokes' to do this than
type out the whole URL longhand.

Thats why I wasn't too concerned with registering 'ecommunications.com.au', nor
am I particularly bothered by 'ecom.com.au' being taken by someone else. Do
people get us confused? Of course they do - but thats because the company names
really are similar, not anything particularly inherent in the domain names.

Hell, I can search Google for 'VODSL in Australia' and still come up with links
to ourselves - and theres no way I could achieve that through simple registering
of domain name variants!

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Brooks                                  |Ph: +61 2 9274 7776
CTO, eCOM Communications                     |Fx: +61 2 9274 7771
mailto:paul.brooks§ecommunications.com.au    |Mob: 0414 366 605
http://www.ecommunications.com.au            |