It drives me crazy to see how small businesses advertise themselves.<\/p>\n
Consider that you run John Doe Construction. You might get johndoeconstruction.com as a domain. But instead, people are registering terrible domains, like j-dcon.net. Shorter is better in some things, but this is really not one of them. “John Doe Construction dot com” is easy to remember, and if I know you’re John Doe Construction, I don’t even have<\/em> to remember it, I just have to type it in and throw “.com” on the end.<\/p>\n But random abbreviations get really confusing. j-d for “John Doe” is already a bit confusing, unless your logo happens to be “JD” or something. Your domain name should be the name you use, not some abbreviation you dreamed up when creating a domain. The dash doesn’t help things, and the inconsistent<\/em> use of dashes is even worse. (“j-d-con.net” would at least be consistent.) Abbreviating “construction” is bad too, especially since there’s no official abbreviation. Is it “cons” or “con” or “const” or what?<\/p>\n And you should really, really get a .com for your business, because everyone assumes a domain, especially a .com, is what you want. Using anything else makes it a bit too likely that people will never find your site.<\/p>\n Oh, and why do you have an @aol.com address for your business’s email? You should have it at your domain, even if it’s just a forwarder. Plus, why is it on the side of your van? I can’t imagine a single person has ever emailed a business after seeing their email on the side of a van.<\/p>\n I think there’s a very big market in setting up websites for small businesses. Get them a domain, host a site, and follow best practices to get it ranked well for their name, especially locally. And coach them on these things, and how to make effective use of their website as a marketing tool.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It drives me crazy to see how small businesses advertise themselves. Consider that you run John Doe Construction. You might get johndoeconstruction.com as a domain. But instead, people are registering terrible domains, like j-dcon.net. Shorter is better in some things, … Continue reading