What changed your domain choices for client websites?

nicenic

nicenic

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Many webmasters learn over time that clients care about different things: trust, spelling, local relevance, price, or future growth.

What experience changed how you choose domains for client projects?
 
Chris Worner

Chris Worner

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What changed it for me was listening to a client read their own domain out over the phone. It had a hyphen in it, so every call turned into spelling the thing letter by letter. I bought the unhyphenated version for them at renewal and have not put a hyphen in a client domain since.

The other one is naming a site after what the client does today. Two of them pivoted inside three years and ended up paying to redirect a name that no longer described anything. Boring brandable names age better than descriptive ones.
 
nicenic

nicenic

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That second example is the one that would stick with me. Keeping one broader backup name can feel unnecessary at first, but after a client pivots, an extra renewal is cheap compared with changing email addresses, links and branding all over again.
 
Paul Wellner Bou

Paul Wellner Bou

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Paul Wellner Bou
nicenic said:
Keeping one broader backup name can feel unnecessary at first, but after a client pivots, an extra renewal is cheap compared with changing email addresses, links and branding all over again.
Click to expand...
The backup name only helps if you actually point it somewhere. I have a folder of defensive registrations that have sat unused for years, and when a client did pivot, the name I had kept was for the wrong direction entirely, because I had guessed at the pivot two years before it happened.

What has been worth more is keeping the domain and the brand loosely coupled from the start, so the site can be renamed without the domain having to change. A boring name nobody has to spell survives a pivot on its own without a second registration.
 
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