Choosing a domain name

Basic principles

Successful domain names are short and memorable. Get this right and you won't go far wrong.

• Short: Your domain name will end up featuring on all your church publicity, so you won't want it to take up lots of space. Also, you don't want to put off people from typing it into their web-browser.
• Memorable: Having seen your website address on a church noticeboard (or wherever) you want to help people remember it so they can visit the website later.

This immediately helps us choose a domain name for, say, St Daniel's Church, Littletown. One obvious domain, st-daniels-church-littletown.org., is simply too long, whereas an abbreviated version, stdachli.co., is both hard to remember and fails to make an obvious link with the church. Far better options would be stdaniels.co., stdanielslittletown.co., or danielschurch.org.

Incidentally, it is best not to use hyphens in a domain name if you can help it. They make it harder for people to type the address, so shorten our-church-domain.org to ourchurchdomain.org. This can make the domain name harder to read, but this is not usually a problem if you restrict the domain name to contain only two words (or three at most).

Local community domains

If your church is trying to to reach a particular local community or town (and presumably it is) then one further option is to choose a domain name related to your community. This is a really good idea.

For example, St Daniel's Church, Littletown would do well to get a domain such as littletown.com, littletownlife.com, littletownonline.com, or littletownchurch.com,

Not only does this provide a domain name which is short and memorable, it gives you a website address which is immediately attractive and interesting to the very people you are trying to reach. It also opens up the possibility that you could make the church website just one part of a larger community website.

Creating a community website would take more work, but is a great idea.