Catholic Techno Geek

A good website design is crucial in getting your product or information out to your target audience, without a doubt. Another key component is have a domain name that your target audience is going to remember and associate with your business, company, or ministry.

If you think of some of the big box stores you frequent, most likely they have a website and that website’s domain name is usually www.bigboxstorename.com. It is easy to remember and as soon at you see it, you can identify the business associated with it.

But what if you are a church and your are St. John’s Lutheran Church, or St. Mary’s Catholic Church. You are kind of stuck. These church names are quite common in each respective faith tradition, and the www.stjohn.com and www.stmary.com domain names already went to the church that registered the name first.

As the domains get used up,  I am sure the next St. John or St. Mary church was forced into try a variation of the domain they were looking for  such  www.stjohnlutheran.com, www.st_mary.com, www.st_john_lutheran.com, www.marycatholicchurch.com, www.lutheranstjohn.com, www.sjl.com or www.smcc.com.

Some of these variations I would say we practical and effective such as www.stjohnlutheran.com or www.stmarycatholicchurch.com, because they were easier to remember and readily identified the church. However, domain names like www.sjl.com and www.smcc.com are not as effective. While the members of those churches may remember the web address, anyone outside of the membership will look at the web address and have no clue what the letters stand for.

So, now what. Well then you start looking at the last part of your web address .com.  When the web was in its early infancy, a domain ending in .com was almost the only type of domain you could get. Later you could get domain names that end in .net  and .org. Today that list has expanded even further. So a www.stjohnlutheran.org might be an option.

However, some of these endings can can only be used by specific types of organizations or countries while others are open to to anyone. Here is where you are going to need to do your research. Because things change so rapidly on the possible options, I won’t list them here. A simple search on your favorite search engine (Google, Bing, Yahooo..) should turn up a list quickly for you.

It might take some creative work, but you will be able to create a domain name that is easy to remember and readily identifies who your are.

Now, I have to admit my domain www.catholictechnogeek.com sorta violates what I said above in that while it is easy to remember, it really doesn’t identify what the site is about. This is partially because I set this site up as a blog or a place to share my thoughts and ideas. I wanted to let the person who stumbled across my domain name to know that yes, this site had some Catholic religious thought to it, but focused on technology. At the same tiem, because I had no church or big box store behind me, I used some creativity and tried to create a domain that people would be curious about it.

If you are reading this article, it must have worked. Thanks.

In my next post, I will take about how to register a url.