General by Leon Hitchens on August 13, 2016
For a long time, I’ve been a proponent of using a .com domain before you had other domain extensions. Now with the rise of different extensions from .beer .ninja to .webhost allows you to buy a vanity URL that better describes your company online, by just telling someone a domain. There is even a .blog domain coming so you can quickly setup a blog and have a custom domain saying your website is a blog. The problem is will someone know to go to a .blog over a .com.
Within our company, we’ve split the domains between vanity URLs to using .com based on the products and branding. We have Codebee.io to show users the sites a developer-focused site, and we have SLK.Media to describe We’re a Media company. We’ve also looked at more domains with custom URL’s to have a better brand and hopefully have our users remember our site.
The problem I’ve heard and seen from users is when you tell them the domain is “SLK.Media” they’ll either ask for you to repeat or add a .com at the end of the whole domain. Now if you’re telling users your domain consistently, it may be hard for them to understand what the domain extension is, but if you’re using social media or printing your domain out, you’ll find that the users see the domain and quickly write it out.
All-in-all, the fact that dot-coms are becoming more and more scarce you’ll need to start branching out toward different domain extension if you want to buy domains in the coming years. We’ve already begun purchasing different domains in conjunction with our .com domains, but in a few cases, we cannot get the .com of our first choice.
Tell us in the comments below if you’re buying vanity domain extensions or thinking of more names that’ll you purchase a .com with!