August 13, 2001

73°

Views
Dot-com or go home

By Naseem Javed
Special to the Tribune
Published August 13, 2001

Domain names contain three parts. The left part –- www –- never really changes. The center part, or body, is anything and everything that can be registered to identify a business. The right part, or extension, should be –- better be -- .com if a business hopes to thrive.

To .com or not to .com is the big question of today. There are dozens of extensions available for businesses -- .net, .biz and even .tv -– but don’t fall for them. Here are a couple of reasons why something other than .com will not work:

·  People are conditioned to go to .com Web addresses. Changing their habits promises to be an uphill battle that businesses with limited marketing budgets aren’t likely to survive.

After all, .com was the last word of the last century – and it took more than a trillion dollars in promotions to make that happen. It would take a similar amount of muscle to raise a dot-something-else to the same level.

·  Anything other than .com is hard to remember and arouses suspicion. When consumers see Web addresses with an extension other than .com, they know that .com probably was taken, and you can bet that they’ll surf to the .com address to see what business – a likely competitor – they’re missing.

So why, if .com is so great, should we introduce other extensions at all? And where will those extensions end? And what about other countries and their versions of Internet domain names? Those are very big questions now being discussed in congressional hearings, and there are no easy answers.

However, businesses can and should find focus while the heady debates continue. They can do themselves huge favors by conducting audits of all the domain names they already possess. Most big corporations have registered thousands of domain names to protect the hundreds of goods and services they sell worldwide. I say appoint a chief of domain naming and encourage him or her to do the studies it takes to drop the junk and focus on the names that have proven popular with consumers. Anything else only serves to confuse. Snapping up domain names for the sake of having them isn’t a wise strategy.

A domain name is worth a ton of gold but is still the most misunderstood component of the corporate communication strategy. It is undervalued as the driving engine for e-commerce. It is flippantly decided by Webmasters and junior staff instead of being protected and promoted by chief executives. And a corporate domain name’s effectiveness is compromised even further when it doesn’t end in .com.

Naseem Javed founded New York-based ABC Namebank International 21 years ago to focus solely on corporate nomenclature. He can be reached at nj@njabc.com.

Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune

Powered by Genuity