I can just choose my company name can’t I?
Well, in an ideal world, yes you could. However the reality is that the Internet has been around a while now. A lot of people have websites and a lot of companies are on the internet. What’s often the case is that customers put effort into branding their company and growing their business, only to find out that when they want a domain name it’s already taken. Often it’ll be an unrelated business at the other side of the country, but it’s still gone.
My domain name has gone! What do I do?
All is not lost, thankfully there’s a greater choice than ever before with TLD (Top Level Domain) name extensions. It used to be that you needed to choose a .co.uk domain name or a .com if appropriate. These days there’s a huge list, way too many to list here, but if “superbuilders.co.uk” was taken (it is) you could choose superbuilders.info, superbuilders.club, superbuilders.store or superbuilders.app. The list goes on and on.
But I want a traditional TLD, mine is taken.
A good option if for a smaller local company is to pick a geographic domain name, using the example above you could choose superbuilders-yorkshire.co.uk, this would have the added benefit of telling your customers (and search engines) about the area you operate in.
Somebody has my domain name, but doesn’t use it?
This is quite common, often these were bought for a reason but never used, or maybe the company as closed and they’ve yet to hand back their domain name. If there’s no site on a domain it may be worth keeping an eye on it. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to buy it at some point in the future if it’s not being used. If you use http://whois.sc you can see exactly when the domain name lapses and maybe be able to snap it up!