There is no doubt that a good domain name can greatly increase trafficflow to a website. Ideally a domain should encapsulate all that you are about. The Irish Times Internet address, ireland.com, is a good example. It aims to inform people on Irish matters and its name reflects that.
If you were researching Ireland but had never even heard of The Irish Times, you might try putting ireland.com into a browser's address line and see what would come up. It is such a good name that others have set up web addresses very similar to it, at least partly in an effort to catch those that mistype.
Have a look at, for instance, wwwireland.com (no dot between the w's and Ireland), or 1reland.com (using the number 1 instead of an i). Both were registered purely for the sake of selling them on.
More successful similar names are www.ireland.org and www.ireland.net. Both are commercial sites designed to sell all things Ireland to you, but the .org version has a history section, while the .net one is all about leprechauns and other insulting cliches.
Registering domain names for commercial gain, a procedure known as cybersquatting, has become something of a gold rush in the last few years, after .com addresses were sold to whoever asked for them rather than being held for the companies and individuals who should have a right to them.
The same situation has not happened with .ie, the Irish domain address, because the domain registry here has been scrupulous in ensuring that addresses do not fall into the hands of those only looking to sell the address on. For example, nobody but the CocaCola company would be allowed to register coca-cola.ie.
In some cases .com addresses have been given to the people who have most claim on them after legal cases. A recent example was when the pop singer Madonna wrested control of madonna.com from a hardcore pornography site.
When the previous owner knew he was going to lose what had cost him $20,000 to buy from the previous squatteroccupier, he offered the name free to to the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Nebraska. It didn't work. The singer's gain was medicine's loss though, and a spokesman for the hospital was quoted as saying: "We are devastated. We wanted the name because it would have meant people could find us easily - and for its religious connotations."
Was he being naive? Is there a person in the world for whom the word Madonna denotes anything other than a tawdry, little-talented showbiz personality? Whatever the answers, the hospital spokesman knew a good Internet address when he saw one.
Two years ago the US Department of Commerce created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to deal with domain name problems (that's who decided on madonna.com's destination). With over 15 million registered .com addresses, and as many again with other endings, this was long overdue.
Because we are fast running out of .com names that make any sense or that bear any relation to the service they purport to represent, Icann was charged with creating new domain endings that would be attractive to industry.
They are reportedly considering addresses such as .shop, .web, .biz and .firm, but information is slow in coming because Icann keep putting back the date when these new domains will be made available.
There are various theories as to the cause of the delays. The only thing that seems certain is that .kids and .xxx will not be used. A recent Icann staff report said these designations, suggested for, respectively, child-friendly and adult-oriented sites, might create more controversy than they solve.
A good website address is very important, but the lesson to be learned here is that going for a .ie suffix may be the only way to guarantee that no one has got there before you.
