A domain name consists of all the characters in a web address (the "URL") up to and including the ".ie", ".com" or ".co.uk" etc part. This is all taken to be case insenstiive, so there is no diffenence between entering "MyGreatWebsite.com" and "mygreatwebsite.com". Now as you can easily see, to the human viewer it makes things a lot more legible to display the domain name with some capitals, but to the systems that make up the Internet, there is no difference.
Great care should be taken when coming up with a new domain name. Potential customers need to be able to remember and enter your domain name correctly or your website performance will be disadvantaged from the start. And if money and time are invested in promoting the website a change will be difficult.
When you're considering a domain name you will or course look at legal and availability considerations first; are you infringing on another business name and what domains are still unregistered. The next thing to consider is how a domain name will perform as part of marketing your business. It's difficult to give hard and fast rules but generally you will be looking for the shortest domain that is memorable and is not easily mistyped.
The Rules
- Domain names must be made up only of letters, numbers and hyphens, no other characters. They are not case sensitive.
- The length should not be an issue but must be from 3 to 64 characters
- There may be other restrictions in certain countries. For example the right to use a personal name or place name may need to be proven to the registrar.
Be careful that your domain cannot easily be parsed by the user as something different or lead to confusion. There are some well known examples of "fails" in this area such as Experts Exchange (expertsexchange.com) so tread carefully !
