Choosing a domain name
Basic principles
Successful domain names are short and memorable. Get this right and
you won't go far wrong.
- Short: Your domain name will end up featuring on all your church
publicity, so you won't want it to take up lots of space. Also, you don't want
to put off people from typing it into their web-browser.
- Memorable: Having seen your website address on a church noticeboard
(or wherever) you want to help people remember it so they can visit the website
later.
This immediately helps us choose a domain name for, say, St Daniel's
Church, Littletown. One obvious domain, st-daniels-church-littletown.org.uk, is simply too long,
whereas an abbreviated version, stdachli.co.uk, is
both hard to remember and fails to make an obvious link with the church. Far
better options would be stdaniels.co.uk, stdanielslittletown.co.uk, or danielschurch.org.uk.
Incidentally, it is best not to use hyphens in a domain name if you
can help it. They make it harder for people to type the address, so shorten our-church-domain.org to ourchurchdomain.org. This can make the domain name harder to
read, but this is not usually a problem if you restrict the domain name to
contain only two words (or three at most).
Local community domains
If your church is trying to to reach a particular local community or town
(and presumably it is) then one further option is to choose a domain name
related to your community. This is a really good idea.
For example, St Daniel's Church, Littletown would do well to get a
domain such as littletown.co.uk, littletownlife.org.uk, littletownonline.co.uk, or littletownchurch.org.uk,
Not only does this provide a domain name which is short and memorable, it
gives you a website address which is immediately attractive and interesting to
the very people you are trying to reach. It also opens up the possibility that you could make the church website just one part of a larger community
website.
Creating a community website would take more work, but is a great idea. We
suggest you read the Web Evangelism Guide's section on Community Portal
Pages for some indication of what might be possible.
This article came from hosea.co.uk
(closed January 2004)
If you would like professional help
with designing/hosting etc your web
site then please feel free to contact
me at chris@browncow.co.uk
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