Choosing a domain name — and whether you need one yet

A domain name is the thing people type, read out over the phone, and print on a signboard. It outlives your current website, your current designer and probably your current logo. It is worth twenty minutes of thought and it usually gets two.

First: you may not need one yet

This is the least popular advice in the guide and the most useful. If you do not have a domain, you can still have a working website today, at an address like yourname.sites.bt, and add your own domain later without rebuilding anything.

The failure we see repeatedly is the reverse order: someone registers a domain in a moment of enthusiasm, the project stalls, and a year later they are renewing a name that points at nothing. Get the site working, then buy the name. The name is a change of address; it is not the house.

The parts of a name

khamsum.bt has two parts. khamsum is the bit you choose. .bt is the top-level domain, and you choose it from a fixed list.

shop.khamsum.bt adds a subdomain, which you can create yourself for free once you own khamsum.bt. Subdomains are not separately purchased, and you can have as many as you like — useful to know before someone sells you three domains for one organisation.

.bt or .com?

Both are fine. They say different things.

What .bt gets you

• Unambiguous location. Nobody has to wonder whether you are the Bhutanese one. For a tour operator, a hotel, or anyone selling Bhutan itself, that is part of the product.
• Availability. The good short names in .com went twenty years ago. In .bt, the obvious name for your business is often still free.
• Credibility locally. A .bt address reads as an established Bhutanese organisation rather than a page someone made last week.

What .com gets you

• Reflex. People type .com without thinking. If your name is spoken aloud a lot, some of that traffic will go to the .com whether you own it or not.
• Ease of purchase. Any international registrar sells it, in minutes, with a card.
• International readability. If most of your customers are abroad and have no particular interest in where you are, .com carries no geography with it.

How to actually choose

Ask where the people you want are. If they are in Bhutan, or coming to Bhutan, take .bt. If they are anywhere and do not care where you are, take .com. If you can afford both, take both and point one at the other — but only after your site works.

Choosing the name itself

There is one test that matters more than every branding rule combined:

Everything below is a way of passing that test.

Rules worth following

• Short beats clever. It gets typed on phone keyboards, in a hurry, by people who are not paying attention.
• Avoid hyphens. Nobody says “hyphen” out loud, and everyone forgets it. tashi-tours.bt loses visitors to tashitours.bt.
• Avoid numbers. Is it 4 or four? You will spend the rest of the business's life clarifying.
• Watch for words that collide. Run the whole string together and read it fresh; the classic examples are unprintable and entirely accidental.
• Think about romanisation. Dzongkha names have more than one common spelling in Latin script. Pick the one people write most, and consider registering the other as well if it is cheap.
• Do not describe this year's business. thimphu-momo-delivery.bt is a problem the day you open in Paro or start doing catering.

Things people worry about that do not matter

• Keywords in the domain. Putting “hotel” in your name does not meaningfully help you rank. Search engines stopped rewarding that a long time ago.
• Length, within reason. A memorable eleven characters beats a cryptic six.
• The “right” extension for prestige. Your visitors are looking for you, not grading your domain.

Where to register it

A .bt domain comes from the registry that runs the .bt zone, or from an authorised reseller. A .com comes from any international registrar.

We are not going to print a price here, and you should be suspicious of any page that does: fees change, they differ between resellers, and a figure written eighteen months ago is worse than no figure at all because it looks authoritative. Ask for the current rate, and ask what the renewal costs — some registrars discount the first year heavily and charge more afterwards.

Three things to insist on, whoever you buy from

1. The domain is registered to you. Your organisation's name in the registrant field, your email as the contact address. If your web designer registers it under their own name “to make it easier”, you do not own your domain — and recovering it later ranges from awkward to impossible if you fall out with them.
2. You can log in yourself. You need access to change where the domain points. If only an agency has the password, every future change goes through them.
3. You know the expiry date, and so does your calendar. Put a reminder a month before. A domain that lapses can be re-registered by anybody, and getting it back is not always possible at any price.

Before you pay

• Type it into a browser. Somebody may already be using it.
• Search for the bare name. If an unrelated and unpleasant business shares it, you inherit the association.
• Check the matching social handles, if that matters to you. Consistency is worth more than the perfect domain.
• Read it once more with fresh eyes, run together, in lower case. That is how it will appear.

After you own it

A registered domain does nothing on its own. It has to be pointed at whatever is serving your website, which is a separate step and the subject of the next guide: pointing your domain at your website.