Five website name mistakes
There’s a mistake a lot of music businesses make with their website. Doesn’t seem to matter whether they’re self-employed singer-songwriters, retailers, venues, lables or equipment manufacturers, they get it wrong in equal measure.
The site could look great, and have all the right elements in place - but if they mess up with the URL (and a lot of them do) then it’s all been a bit of a waste of effort.
The URL, for reference sake, is the name that you type into the bar up the top of the web browser up there. The bit that goes “http://www.name.com” - or whatever.
If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up a website, you presumably want people to find you again. In that case, here are things to avoid. These are my top five mistakes music businesses make with the name of their website:
1) Long URLs: www.thisisthebestwebsiteaboutmusic.com is a pain to type, and people have so many opportunities to get it wrong as they do. I should heed my own advice here: newmusicstrategies is on the long side. I’d aim for 7 letters or less if you can possibly help it.
2) Tricky spellings: www.beatznthyngs.com might look cool (it doesn’t, but go with me on this) - but nobody is ever going to remember what strange variant of spelling you’ve used. URLs should be easily spelled with no confusion.
3) Numbers in the URL: www.in2music4evercositsgr8.com is neither memorable nor easily discovered. Unless your band is called 123Go, you’ll want to leave numbers out altogether.
4) Unspeakable URLs: www.qzlpstk.com is not something you can tell somebody at a party - or even say out loud. If you have to spell the URL when you tell another human being, it’s a bad URL.
5) Subdomains: If you’re going to go to the trouble of having a website, at least be a little bit professional about it. Get your own hosting so you can have www.yourname.com rather than www.yourname.cheapweb.com or what have you.
Again, I’m going to need to take my own advice about this. My personal blog The Wireless breaks a couple of these. People go looking for wireless.com - when it’s thewireless.blogspot.com - though in my defence, it’s only still called that because it’s been there for four and a half years, and www.dubber.com isn’t available. Looking for alternatives - and well aware of the hypocrisy.
It’s worse than that - some people seem to have difficulty spelling ’strategies’ - so even though New Music Strategies is both speakable and reasonably memorable, there’s still an opportunity to make a mistake with it.
But you’re here, aren’t you? I can at least take comfort from that.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Robyn
I recommend not getting a domain name with a hyphen in it.
Not only is it potentially confusing to spell aloud (it that cool-music.com or coolhyphenmusic.com?), but there’s also the risk that if your website’s name doesn’t have the hyphen in it (Cool Music), people could assume the URL doesn’t either and will try coolmusic.com.
I learned this from personal experience!
Oct 31st, 2006
Butch
You’d think this would be common sense, but when we’re setting up our clients domains, we do a rather extensive search to see what domains look alike, sound alike, etc. I advise people to not even use a sound-alike name if one is already registered. If, in fact, a domain they want that is a cool name is -not- taken and has no (or hardly any) derivatives of that name, I advise them to register around it - in other words, get the primary .com name, then register the .net too and words that sound alike, common ways to mispell it, and also hyphenated if the phrase is one that people may check a couple different ways. Of course, if your goal is only to leech off some traffic meant for some other web site with the “correct” primary name and they were stupid enough to leave like-sounding derivatives and common mispellings unregistered, then by all means, lock up the bogis domain. Alot of companies make a living off this kind of traffic scarfing. (I devised this strategy long after having registered coolmusic.com. We actually used to get alot of traffic from people using derivative spellings trying to undercut us… it backfired on them!)
Jan 3rd, 2007
Jezebelus
Absolutely agree with you. I will never understand how is possible that sites such as flickr.com became so popular
Jun 19th, 2007
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