Anyway, don’t panic: if after a while you regret your choice, the world doesn’t end. Technically it is not complicated to change one domain for another and commercially it is not a drama if it has not been a long time.
Where and how to buy a domain name?
Let’s start at the beginning: where can you buy a domain name and how is it done?
Acquiring a domain name is a completely online process, you can do it in a few minutes through a domain provider. Domain providers usually also offer services such as web hosting and/or corporate email.
There are no major differences in quality of service between domain providers. However, the prices of the different providers are very different.
Be careful, because there are many aggressive and misleading offers. For example: GoDaddy’s 0.99€.
That is the price for the first year, but then you “eat” the following year 19,99€ + VAT for renewal, which is more than 24€ per year. On top of that, we are talking about a provider with a very bad reputation.
The best offer I have found is that of Ionos, with €1 for the first year but, above all, for the very good price of annual renewal. Find out for yourself and be surprised .
And, if you hire hosting and domain together, in the hostings that I recommend here you will find reasonable prices, only SiteGround is a little bit off with its 15,99€ per year.
How to choose your domain name
Now that you know where to buy a domain name, let’s see what criteria you should take into account to choose a good name:
Do you want to express the subject matter with your brand?
Most brands are totally agnostic to the type of products or services they sell. For example, if you didn’t already know that “Alfa Romeo” is a car brand, it would be very difficult for you to guess from the name alone.
Sometimes, however, brands are devised to express the activity behind them.
For example: this website, “WordPress a Tope”, makes it very clear what the theme of this website is going to be about: everything that has to do with WordPress.
We could have gone even further by making the brand name suggest in some way that it is primarily a training site, not a site for selling products or services.
But, on the other hand, we also preferred to leave it open in this sense because it’s not at all clear that in the medium term this site is going to be solely for training and outreach.
So this issue is a double-edged sword: it can be very good for people who do not know your brand to be more interested in it from the first moment. It helps to identify what your brand does and this will help you grow a little faster. But to the same extent it can also tie you more to where you want to take it in the future.
The decision then depends on the prospects for the evolution of your project and your personal tastes of how you perceive one or the other style of branding.
A brand domain or a keyword domain?
Your web domain can represent a brand name (existing or that you want to create with this project) or you can target a very specific need for which there is a great demand.
Back to the example of our own website, “WordPress a Tope”. Its domain is wpatope.com, a branded domain in which there are no keywords (words used in search engines).
On the contrary, a good example of a keyword domain would be, for example, neumaticosbaratos.com. This makes sense when your website is oriented to a very specific niche demand, that’s why this kind of websites are also called niche websites or sites.
At the time, they also had a certain advantage in SEO. In the previous example, if someone searched for “cheap tires”, “buy cheap tires” or similar, the domain would have an important plus of strength to be at the top of the results.
But, according to Google, this is no longer the case today.
However, you may find a keyword-type name that you like and that fits perfectly with your project. So this can be a good reason to use it.
A personal brand domain or a commercial brand domain?
If you don’t go for a domain for a niche site, but a name for your brand, again there are two possibilities to think about: a personal brand or a commercial brand.
A personal brand domain is basically using your name as a domain, for example: bertolopez.com, as we saw before, a trademark would be this website, for example.
This will be largely a matter of strategy and personal preferences where you also have to meditate well the implications of one or the other option.
For example: if you eventually get a profitable business and you are interested in getting rid of it, with a personal brand, depending on what you are going to do, it may be more complicated because your person is so linked to the brand that, without you, the brand will no longer make sense.
But also here it depends on the specific case: it would not be the same if martarodriguez.com is the brand of a freelance lawyer than if it is the brand of an online wine store.
Finally, make sure that the domain name is as clear, easy to write and remember as possible.
Legal aspects of a domain name
Once you have a first idea or ideas for domain names, keep in mind that we are talking about a name that may have already been registered as industrial property and be protected against illegitimate uses.
It is rare that a protected trademark name does not also have the corresponding domain name registered in the main extensions, but it can happen.
But it can also be partially protected. Even this website, which is dedicated to WordPress, had this problem because the company behind WordPress, Automattic, expressly warns not to use this trademark in domain names.
That is, if our domain was wordpressatope.com, we could have a problem with them.
Fortunately, the abbreviation of “wp” is already so recognized that wpatope.com is still a recognizable domain name for our public and short, which is always good.
In addition, Automattic expressly encourages the use of “wp” for WordPress-related sites, so in our case, in the end, we were able to balance things out quite well.
Which extension to use for your domain
Having considered the name as such, let’s now look at the issue of extensions, i.e. whether to use a .com, .es, .org, .net, etc. domain.
Again, there is a lot to talk about, but here I will simplify it for you:
Generally speaking, the preferred option is still “.com”. Simply because of culture: it is the most “typical” extension, along with “.es”, if you type your brand in the browser they will use it by default, etc. The downside is that it will also be the most difficult to find domains still available.
The “.es” is a good alternative if you are going to focus your activity clearly in Spain. The reasoning is similar for other countries, for example, in the case of Mexico, “.mx”. In addition, it can give you a small advantage in Google for that country.
Then you have a wide range of other options: the classic “.org” and “.net” and an endless number of generic extensions (not country-specific) that have been added. Anyway, if the name is already being used as a “.com” or “.es” domain, it is not a good idea for you to use it with another extension.
