Is there a consensus on what's better? mynewdomain.com or my-new-domain.com
Edit: Wow, thank you to everyone for all the comments, definitely going without hyphens!
Posted Apr 8, 2016, 5:55 PM UTC · edited
So long as your company name isn't something like Pen Island, it doesn't really matter either way.
Local soccer team is tacomastars.com
I know it's Tacoma Stars, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look like Taco Mastars every time.
I'd lobby to change the team name to taco masters
I'd second that nomination.
They wouldn't even have to buy a new domain.
I sure could go for a taco right now!
What about Experts Exchange?
The worst has to be Mole Station Nursery.
Thanks god it's a gardening nursery and not the other kind.
Therapists.com is up there.
Yeah that'd definitely be clearer as the-rapists.com
My company once bought a domain for their parts department.... Matecpartsexchange...the parts company has since changed names, but once you see it, it's hard to not.
I'll bet someone already has it anyway =(
So much for my resort island made of pens.
Is that why it's experts-exchange.com?
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Get both
any reason for this?
Domains are cheap and is a good idea to buy similar spellings, that way users can always find you and helps you prevent phishing
how cheap are we talking here?
Domains are like $10 a year
Depends on where you get it from and the extension (.com, .me, .co etc.). Usually about £10-£20/year
We are ratemyagent at work and there's another company in Canada (we are Australian) that's rate-my-agent... We got slightly confused sometimes and odd support tickets
You could AB test.
Put your site on mydomain.com, buy my-domain.com and refer everyone to mydomain.com. Boom.
Or, if you're my ex's hosting company, redirect everything not on the homepage to www.shittyhosting.com/~sites/mydomain.com/
Dicks.
They just had your link structure (Home and Site URL in Wordpress, Home in Magento, etc.) referencing to the temporary URL for cPanel - hostname/~username/.
That has probably been done so your ex could work on his/her website before the domain has been pointed to that server. That just needs to be changed once you point the DNS to the server, and is really 30 seconds of "work". :)
Yeah, 30 seconds they hadn't bothered / remembered to do in two years. Muppets.
I always go for the sans-hyphen approach
My rule is if you have to spell the domain name out, it's resale value is exactly what you paid for it. "Clever" spelling and dashes are worthless. And you get sick of giving out your email in voice mode.
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'sans' is french for 'without', as in the font-property 'sans-serif' -> without serifs.
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Same with hyphenated and non-hyphenated.
I have a domain with a hyphen in it and to be honest, I wish I'd gone without it. It would be much clearer to tell people to email me at "web brewer dot co dot uk" than it is to say "web hyphen brewer dot co dot uk". Especially as there seem to be an awful lot of people who don't actually understand which key is the hyphen.
"The minus key. Like in maths."
www.mytheminuskeylikeinmathsdomain.com
"It's not working. I've tried it like 10 times."
Buy both and A/B test from a marketing perspective.
I would assume no hyphens is easier to remember and read out to potential visitors
I honestly don't think I've ever seen a legit, actually useful website with two (or more) hyphens in its domain name. It's always something sketchy like cheap-herbal-medicine.biz.
Definitely get it without any hyphens.
Agreed, no one uses hyphens, and I'd see it as bad practice to do so. Hyphens should be reserved for clean urls, like article names for example.
In it used to render as http://xn--h4hg.ws
Get both. Always tell the clean one to your clients, however put you website on the hyphenated one and redirect the naked. This creates a better reading experience when on the website and glancing at the url bar. Good luck
I don't know, are you looking at penisland.com ? Whorepresents.com? Maybe it's an important hyphen?
Or therapistfinder.com maybe?
Oh damn. I hadn't seen that one before. And it really is a website... https://www.WhorePresents.com
I was hoping for a playful Q/A in the FAQ. Something like Q: "Where be da shit to buy for dem bitches?" A: "Sorry sir, wrong website."
expertsexchange.com added a hyphen some ten years ago, and eventually dropped the old domain name.
If I have a longer name that i want to use for SEO I usually have a marketing name as well. So if I buy "Best-Affordable-Widget.com" to use for SEO, I'll use "BuyWidgets.com" on all print and non-link building marketing then 301 that to the proper domain. That way users can easily find me and I still benefit from the longer, more annoying, name.
One of our clients have a double hyphen in their domain name, like: foo--bar.com
Yeah, we told them it was stupid.
Interestingly, foo--bar.com is available.
Because a double hyphen in the name is stupid.
Only reason before to go for the hyphens was if you were targeting that particular keyword. That doesn't work like it used to, so I'd get the one without the hyphens. If you expect to grow the business, might as well get the hyphenated one as well to protect the brand.
It depends what the words start and send with. Example, you should definitely hyphenate a-nu-start.com
Depends on the name, but I agree that you should buy both if you want to avoid problems later on. Not so much because of user issues, but someone will grab the domain if it becomes popular or valuable enough. The headaches later aren't worth the cost of a meal.
I also recommend u/Robert_F_Gallagher's advice below, because some people are just too lazy to type out a long name, even once.
As for user dash-hyphen issues, I think that's mostly irrelevant these days. Yes, you may lose some if you have hyphens, but it depends a lot upon your audience, and how often you expect them to visit. If they're likely to bookmark your domain, or they visit often enough that it stays in their location bar, you'll be fine for most of your visitors that use the internet regularly.
My gut feeling is that if someone can't handle hyphen's, most websites are going to confuse them as well, so losing them may lower your support costs significantly.
If you're heavily dependent upon occasional visits from people who rarely use the internet (e.g., B2B catering to very busy brick and mortar small business owners, or the Class of 1906 High School Reunion website), then being easy to remember with no errors is more important.
In the 1990s and early-2000s, this was important, but the group of people that can't adapt to different domain names is shrinking quickly as time passes. A lot of domain-related logic from that time still lingers on, but it hasn't been important for a long time.
Today, I'd rather have a catchy name that sticks in people's minds, rather than something that fits the 90s ideals.
Sauce: I've watched plenty of people make bad decisions based upon bad advice on domain trading sites.
No hyphens. Think about others having to type out your domain name and hyphens are a bit of an inconvenience. You can always camelcase it for promotional material, MyNewDomain.com
hyphens bad unless it makes a dirty word
do use hyphens for your path names though, like:
Can you think of any popular, highly respected websites with a dash in the name?
Dashes are usually only something you see in small low budget websites where they couldn't get the name without dashes and they weren't creative enough to come up with a different name (I should know, I've named websites with dashes before).
It's generally better to go without a hyphen. The one exception is when you're doing a personal site with a common name. No one's going to fault you for having to buy Whoever-Smith.com.
I prefer no hyphens because with the former you can just say "Go To My New Domain dot com"... with the latter you need to say "Go To My hyhpen New hyphen Domain hyphen dot com"
This. Whenever you're asking this question imagine you're saying it to someone out loud. The path of least resistance is almost always the ideal answer.
Try telling people your new email address: "hitting dot smoke at numeral 2 numeral 4 hyphen s e v e n dot com"
This is oddly specific
Just an example.
My point was, if you have to spell it out it gets boring pretty quickly.
[email protected]
Or [email protected]?
or hittingdotsmokeatnumeraltwonumeralfourhyphensevendotcom@gmail.com ? ;)
This is why I don't even hyphen names of articles. I picture there's going to be some grandma who remembers the url and wants to tell their son about an article they read but don't know how to send links.
Using hyphens to separate words in an article title is a good idea, because it improves readability of the URL and improves SEO.
Using hyphens in a domain name is a bad idea simply because very few sites do it, so it's not commonly expected.
Also it's not rocket surgery to have a blanket redirect that strips out hyphens so you can advertise it hyphenated but it works if you forget them.
Full article title in URL yes.
Seriously. One of my sites is plyl.st (pl
ayli.st).It's also much easier to type on mobile devices.
Even then an uncomfortably large percentage of people you talk to will not know what a hyphen is and will type a semicolon, slash, etc.
This is 100% true. If there's one thing I've learned since graduating college, it's that people are dumb.
I try to imagine myself telling a non-native English speaker in a hurry over the phone.
Can pronunciation cause misunderstandings? E.g. Muse sounds like news.
Is it hard to spell? Maybe ubiquitous-cockatoo.com isn't that great even if it explains your business perfectly.
Is it hard to remember? Long addresses or odd characters are probably the cause of this.
Having to explain in-depth how to spell the URL is just awkward.
i'm onto you, new github repo name generator