Use a short domain

Choosing a name for your website, your online identity, the thing you'll need to say to people all the time is very important. Ideally, you should choose a name that is short, unique, easy to remember and easy to spell. A good domain should be unambiguous, for example, stationary.com and stationery.com sound the same when spoken, but have very different meanings when written. It also helps to avoid ambiguity with numbers and characters that look or sound similar.

So, my own choice of maniacalrobot.co.uk was the obvious choice! yeah, maybe not. It fails on pretty much every point, but at least it's unique. To handle my online identity, I've been using GSuite, allowing me to easily use this for emails too. Trying to spell this to people is virtually impossible, and trying to type it usually requires 2 attempts.

A simple solution to having long domain names is to simply register a shorter form that you can use, and that automatically redirects to your full address. For me, http://m7r4.uk will automatically redirect to the full http://maniacalrobot.co.uk, and using GSuote, you can add this as an alias to receive your emails on too. But why m7r4.uk? This compresses the complicated words from the full domain into a nice simple letter + number + letter + number. It's easy to say, and easy to spell, and nice and short. ManiacalRobot.co.uk is an M followed by 7 characters, then an R followed by 4 characters, and instead of using the full .co.uk, I simply chose .uk. It's a simple naming scheme that can easily be applied to any domain and makes spelling to people in person a lot easier.

About the Author

Phil Balchin is a full-time software developer at Zendesk, previously at Heroku/Salesforce, and Kyan, as well as a part-time photographer living in Guildford, Surrey, UK.

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