I was over at Namecheap, a domain name registrar, looking for a list of annual registration fees. When I looked over their list of top-level domains, I was a bit surprised to see more than a few TLD that I hadn’t known existed:
- .construction
- .contractors
- .equipment
- .lighting
- .plumbing
A TLD is the end part of web domain name or email address. .com is the most common, and other familiar ones are .org and .net.
There are few more, but these 5 are the most relevant to tools, tradesmen, and other such professional. Maybe eventually there will an expansion to include .masonry, .electrician, .machinist, roofing and other TLDs of similar nature.
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To be frank, when someone contacts me out of the blue for the first time, I don’t like to see a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or aol email address. I am also reluctant to purchase goods or hire services from those with similarly unprofessional email addresses. [email protected] doesn’t exactly give me the impression of a successful long-standing business.
These days .com domains are hard to come by, or at least .com domains with less than 12 letters and few or no hyphens, which means one probably won’t have their first choice of domain name.
The new TLDs mean tradesmen and businesses could set up websites and email addresses with logical domains.
To show how this would work, let’s say ToolGuyd was actually a plumbing business. The website could be set up at ToolGuyd.plumbing, and my email address would be something like [email protected].
In theory, this is a great idea. But in practice, I cannot really see tradesmen or business owners taking advantage of the new domains. What do you think?
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fred
Very interesting – I learn something every day!
Being retired – I’m not exactly worried about these things nowadays. One issue that I ran into was that when you buy a business what you do about its website and domain name may require some thought. One approach is to abandon some domain names that don’t get a lot of traffic – or you might decide to maintain a few websites associated with different parts of the business and provide links under the flagship site. If you had the experience of needing to deal with different .com, .biz and .net domains for subsidiaries – you could start to worry that prospective customers might think you were running some sort of scam.
Michael Quinlan
I think the seemingly never ending expansion of top level domain names has gone too far, and probably started heading in the wrong direction around the time that .biz came into being. These new extensions are just ridiculous, and the main (only?) benefit they offer is to domain name registrars and hosting companies, in the form of increased registrations and fees. Even the usurping of country-specific TLDs (like .tv and .co – the equivalent of .us for other countries) irritates me.
However, I completely agree with your assessment of businesses using email addresses ending in @aol.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc. The sad part is that these people have no idea how pathetic it makes them look, or how much ridicule they receive behind their backs. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that many of these “businesses” using @aol.com email addresses are still paying
AOLAol (I almost forgot they changed it) for the “privileged” – something Aol stopped charging for years ago – on an opt-out basis, of course.Kimber Janney
Trade specific domain names seem clumsy, many trade companies names already reference their trade; bills plumbing.plumbing sounds silly and bills.plumbing doesn’t is confusing; it is not instantly recognizable as a web address.
Norm Huizenga
It’s funny you mentioned the email thing. While yes it was free, I have had the username and email for almost 20 years!
Bill K
While I can see the utility in trade-specific domain names, I as a user don’t want something else to remember and enter.
Jim Felt
Morning.
Just saw this and in my field of advertising photography we bid on maybe 7 “.photography” Top Level Domain Names and “won” 5.
So far Google has not seen ours in any meaningful way. But their respective SEO is all very low as most people do not realize these things exist. Our regular and by definition default .com names are well and easily found.
So for a relatively small name “protection” cost we thought it will be a blast.
10-4
Rob
Adding trade-specific TLDs is a disaster. It was bad enough when registrars started trying to push .net, and .org, then .biz, .cc, etc., on you when you just wanted the .com.
I guarantee you that using a .plumbing e-mail address on a business card will not receive a single email from anyone who receives that business card because everyone will assume the omitted .com was a typo and will send mail to .plumbing.com. If I hadn’t seen this toolguyd post, even I would probably assume the same thing, and as a software engineer I usually assume I’m at least slightly more tech-savvy than the average person.
In fact, I’ve come across many people who have never had to type any TLD except .com, so they think every website and e-mail address needs .com at the end. I think I even had to point out to my brother a couple years ago that a website he was trying to load just ended in .net, not .net.com.