The Visuals of Promoting Your Domain Name
By CleverSage | February 13, 2008
The promotion of your domain name, whether offline or online, is one of the critical factors of a successful site. You have spent countless hours and untold amounts of your hard-earned money to make your domain name as recognizable and memorable as possible. Although it seems small and not very significant, the way you display your website address when you are promoting your site will determine whether you gain 100 new visitors or 1,000 or just 1.
We’re not talking about your logo and graphics, we’re talking about the way your actual domain name looks when you’re promoting it. You have several different options available when showing your URL in a text format, here are some examples with CleverSage.com:
“http://www.YourSite.com”
When at all possible try and avoid this method of displaying your domain name. The “http://www.” in front of your domain is just one more obstacle and barrier that gets in the way of people trying to remember your site. They are useless characters in this instance and will only builds up a wall between you and potential visitors.
“http://YourSite.com”
This is another way of displaying your domain name that I would also recommend avoiding. It does not include the “www” but does include the standard “http.” In today’s world the “http://” is a given when someone is looking for a site.
“www.YourSite.com”
Displaying your site without the “http://” but with the “www” is my second-best recommendation. It is easy to read and some sites need the “www” to work properly. Keep in mind though, if you are promoting subdomains that this option will not work (because unless you configure your domain, subdomains will not work with the “www” in front of them).
However, if your site is skewed to an older demographic, I would recommend using this form for promoting your domain name. Older, less tech-savvy internet users tend to have a harder time navigating and inputting information on the internet.
There is one other consideration to be made when promoting domains through this method. If you are marketing a: .info, .mobi, .biz, or any non-.com extension, then I would highly recommend putting using this form as it shows those viewing your ad or promotion that it is a website. There are still many people out there that have no idea you can go to whatever.travel or whatever.name.
“YourSite.com”
This is how I would recommend promoting your domain name when you are advertising or marketing. By excluding the “http” and the “www” you are presenting only the most important and pertinent information to those you are advertising to. The “.com” makes it instantly recognizable that it is a website you are promoting.
One Final Note
I would also like to point out that whenever you are promoting your domain through a visual medium, you should capitalize the letters of each word. For example: CleverSage.com instead of cleversage.com. This not only breaks up the domain so you can differentiate the words but also creates a stronger visual reinforcement.
Topics: Branding, Domain Names |
February 21st, 2008 at 8:27 am
What is your reasoning besides personal bias to display a domain like this? From a technical standpoint you are wrong. You should always display your URL in lowercase because that is the standard way to display it and any modern browser will reformat the URL to lowercase if you use uppercase letters.
I think that this is a really variable subject matter and that it depends on what your URL is. You touch on that a little bit but I think more focus should be put on the fact that variability of your domain name(s) will depend on how you should promote it. What I mean by “name(s)” is many people who are serious about making money on the web will have a number of websites that all link together or a bunch of domains that contain keywords relating to their content that point to their main website.
This was a good read though. Stirs up ideas.