Re: hyphens in domain names?

Give me a day or two to dig through my archives, but this is my answer to 
your question:

The explosion of content on the web and the web's popularity means that the 
average person is used to spelling long domain names.  If i named a site 
disodiuminosinate.com it would most likely be written for an audience which
1) knows the term
2) looks for the term
3) can spell the term.

If I were writing the page for a more general audience, I would of course 
choose or recommend an easier domain name more suited to the site's 
purpose, like
1)  IMPinmyfood.com
2)  JustSayNoMSG.com
3)  IMPandYourHealth.com

because simply put, I'd be a fool to expect the average user to spell out 
organic compounds.  But still, the length of the domain name doesn't seem 
to matter as much as keeping in mind who my audience is...in fact, a longer 
domain in plain language can be catchier and easier to remember than a 
smaller, more cryptic one. An example of this is www.rt6.com vs. 
www.BayAreaStartups.com.  These domains go to the same page.

Furthermore, most of my new visitors would most likely come from hyperlinks 
such as
1) search engine citations
2) journal citations

which I would throw huge efforts into establishing. This is because search 
engines have evolved to the point where people no longer need to guess at a 
domain name to find information they're looking for, and because references 
to my page from respected journals or other professional resources, aside 
from sending me targeted traffic, lends my site credibility.

Take care,
Collette


At 06:01 PM 4/15/02 -0400, you wrote:

>On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Collette McNeill wrote:
>
> > If I were you I'd pick the hyphenated domain name to advertise. It'd be
> > more understandable in teeny tiny type. Studies show that more complicated
> > domain names don't impact site traffic the way they did in the 20th 
> century.
>
>How could it not affect site traffic?  If I've got a domain
>www.disodiuminosinate.com, how would the traffic not be affected vs just
>having www.this.com?
>
>Can you point us to these studies you refer to?  Thanks!
>
>Mike

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA