Take time before choosing a business domain name

New research suggests that many small businesses may be rushing their choice of web address.

According to a survey released by Fasthosts, 41% of business owners spend under one hour deciding on their business domain name.

According to the survey of 615 business owners, 61% did not even seek a second opinion before making a domain name choice.

The average business admitted to spending between 6 and 12 hours on the decision - the same amount of time the average business spent selecting IT equipment such as PC's and printers.

As we've discussed in other articles on Bytestart, including the much read Top 10 Business Domain Name Tips, there are a number of important factors which should be considered before buying a domain name for your small business.

The name should be future proof, you should buy several domain name variants to protect your identity, and you should try to tie in your domain name with your "offline" identity.

Although the .com and .co.uk are by far the most popular domain name choices for UK businesses (for obvious reasons), the survey results also suggested that most business owners hadn't investigated any other forms of domain name suffix (such as .biz and .eu). In some cases, these newer domain name types may be useful - try our article on domain name types.