The discussion around which domain name I should use for Crowd Favorite (both offline and online in the comments and on Twitter) has been very interesting to me.
We’re down to two clear finalists:
- crowdfavorite.net
- crowdfave.com
and lots of folks are making excellent points.
Let me hit some of the highlights.
- The crowdfavorite.net supporters generally tell me that .net is the second best choice after .com, while the crowdfave.com supporters seem to genuinely like the crowdfave.com domain.
- crowdfavorite.net is easily translated from hearing it to typing it.
- crowdfave.com is shorter than crowdfavorite.net.
- If I do end up getting crowdfavorite.com, a transition from crowdfavorite.net is probably easier.
- Conversely, crowdfavorite.net is more easily confused with crowdfavorite.com.
- crowdfave.com suffers from “how was that shortened again?” issues.
- crowdfave.com is more informal and fun.
- Yes, I will have both pointing to the same place but I need one domain for e-mails, URLs in documentation, etc.
- crowdfavorite.net keeps the tradition of having the business at a .net address (kingdesign.net).
- The less tech-savvy folks I’ve asked have been nearly unanimous on crowdfave.com – they are not as comfortable with .net TLDs.
- Brian nicely articulated:
i’d rather have a .net domain and have it be the name of my company than have a .com and have it not.
This was also the argument made by Scott and Eric – that the domain should match the company name if at all possible.
I was always planning to use crowdfavorite.net, but the response to crowdfave.com has gotten my attention. This decision is holding up a number of things, but I want to make sure I’ve thought it through completely. Your input in the comments and by voting is very much appreciated.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Joost Schuur adds this Comment:
I tried to think of a company that uses .net for it’s corporate identity and couldn’t spontaneously come up with one.
I think the risk of losing traffic to the .com when giving out a .net address far outweighs the risk of having to spell out crowdfave.com. You’ve obviously thought ahead and have crowdfav.com too.
Having said that, we used to use gamespy.net at work for the tech licensing department of the GameSpy brand, when gamespy.com was used by the editorial GameSpy site. We just recently switched to poweredbygamespy.com, to avoid people hitting gamespy.com, thinking they’d find the particular division I’m in.
June 5th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
brett adds this Comment:
“The less tech-savvy folks I’ve asked have been nearly unanimous on crowdfave.com – they are not as comfortable with .net TLDs.”
This is an interesting perspective. For the tech-savvy crowd (and tech-savvy potential customer), this is mostly an irrelevant discussion. We’ll all find the page regardless. But if there are customers who will think to themselves “Are these guys a respectable company?” based on the URL, then maybe custfave.com is the one you want to go forth with.
OTOH, there’s some validity to an argument that you don’t *want* those kind of customers, but that’s obviously up to you.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
jenz adds this Comment:
This is a tough one. I really prefer company URLs with .com for the same reasons as Joost. With that said, you have been doing business with a .net address for a few years now and it has not seemed to bother you or hinder business. I like the idea of the .com name, but not at the expense of the “how was that shortened again?”. I would use the .net full name address until you can get ahold of the .com name. The transition will be much easier – and it is never a bad idea to have the .net of your company name.
June 6th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Vince adds this Comment:
I also voted for crowdfavorite.net as the abbreviation will come back and haunt you for a long time. I work at Common Ground Distributors, and before I started there, they had [and still use] the comground.com domain name. It is a nightmare to have to spell that out to people [one 'm', etc]. I registered [and transfered] commongrounddistributors.com and commongroundbooks.com and a bunch of others simply so that on the phone, it would be easier to say. We deal with a lot of folks who are not *that* tech savvy, but we try to encourage them to go to the website to place orders, rather than the phone.
For e.mail, I still use the shorter address, and of course postfix and apache are all mapped so that any one of a zillion combos will come to us [though we have tried, commonground.com is still not for sale and probably never will be].
I also think it looks tacky on our business cards to show the shorter URL. I think those that have been there longer than I [i've been there about 3 years] have also seen this problem, but are so used it to it, it doesn’t matter much to them. Maybe a dot net doesn’t have the same ego-boosting that a dot com does, but I think it is important that your domain name match the business name, regardless of the TLD. Heck, even a .biz would work, even if that is an even bigger kick in the ego.
Shortening the domain name will come back to haunt you….trust me!
/vjl/
June 6th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Sean Porter adds this Comment:
How do people find your site?
1) Google
2) Business Card/Email/Etc
3) Spoken word
1 and 2 handle themselves, as soon as you launch proplery you have everybody you know witth a little googlejuice give you a little link love.
3 is the edge case, the one that you need to optimize for. crowdfavorite dot net, or crowd-f-a-v-e dot com?
June 7th, 2007 at 3:44 am
Kent adds this Comment:
Alex,
My preference would be crowdfavorite.net, but I wonder if you think that using KingDesign.net caused any issues vs. using KingDesign.com?
And just to muddy the waters, did you think about using crowdfavorIT.com? Obviously capitalization doesn’t matter with the name, but it would be more of a branding thing having IT stand out. Just another option.
June 7th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Kent adds this Comment:
and naturally just read your decision in the twitter post…
June 7th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Decision: crowdfavorite.net | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[...] I asked a few people which they liked better and started getting interesting responses. That prompted me to take a poll, which led to even more interesting feedback. [...]
June 7th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Daniel Pasco adds this Comment:
Alex,
As I said to you via IM, I think that .net is pretty appropriate for people or organizations involved in active web development (hell, any distributed computing development at all, for that matter.
To me, .com implies a company, but .net implies something on a more technical level or a social networking site. Either one seems more appropriate for cats of our ilk.
Bravo, and good choice.
-Daniel
June 7th, 2007 at 11:20 pm