Domain Names

Put simply a domain name is the address that people use to find you or your company online,
it’s what you type in the browser’s address bar to go to a specific website.
e.g. our domain name is: http://www.developone.com

Choosing domain names like choosing a name for your company can be a frustrating task. In this section we give you some guidance that can help ease the process.

If you already have a name for your company - the obvious best choice is to start right there. Remember That you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to find your site whether they have seen your web address on a tv ad, flyer, your business card or not at all.

So for example, We are Develop One Consulting - the first domain name we looked at was developone.com - lucky enough it was available so we registered that.
We then looked at developone.co.za, because Develop One Consulting is situated in South Africa (South Africa has co.za as it’s top-level domain - we will look at top-level domains and their significance a bit later). This was also available so we registered it.

Shorter domain names are better - they are quicker to type and can be easily remembered. That is exactly the reason we prefered developone.com over developoneconsulting.com - If you have a long company name you can go for an abbreviation - but bear in mind that to date most 3, 4 and 5 letter domain names are taken.

Try to choose a domain name that is hard to misspell . There should be no doubt as to how it should be spelt if heard orally. (Here our domain name fails slightly - some people are not sure if it should be developone.co.za or develop1.co.za - we realised this and bought the domain develop1.co.za , which also brings you to this site.)

Earlier we mentioned top-level domains -

Top-level Domains are what occurs after the name itself. In other words, you have developone.com. The ‘.com’, or ‘.net’, or ‘.org’ is the top level domain, or TLD. For most people, we don’t really pay attention to it, but it’s just more of the address. You can view a list of TLD’s and what they mean here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

The most common domain to date is the .com domain which is meant to signify a commercial entity.
I always suggest checking if you can get yourdomainname.com, the next step would be to check if you can get the domain with a tld for the location of your company - yourdomainname.co.za for South Africa, co.uk for United Kingdom and so on. (For non-profits look at .org).

Recently there has been a trend towards also purchasing domain names which add to the memorable factor for example .tv (which is actually the TLD for an island called Tuvalu) - these are being used by many television stations and other media related sites.

Availability of the names you have chosen is key, draw up a list of several suitable options and send it to us to check their availability for you.