In a San Francisco Laundromat — Judging Domains

A non-scientific look at modest business domain names.

This past Labor Day, while vacationing in San Francisco, I found myself feeding quarters into a washer in a laundromat. (Ah, the joys of traveling with a three-year-old). Perhaps it was a fitting situation, since I own both SanFrancisco.us and Laundromats.us.

With nothing to do except watch the dryer spin, I started to analyze the flyers papered to the walls. It was encouraging that so many of the modest businesses advertising in the laundromat had domain names. But it was discouraging to see how bad some of them were. Here are some of my observations:

RipeFruitWriting.com – Sure, it’s a long domain. But I like how the flyer positions the domain name as the focus point. It allowed them to put the flyer at the very top of the wall but still have an impact.

PanTheater.com – it’s the logical domain for this theater. But it also looks like PantHeater.com (something I could have used on a cool San Francisco day). The theater ought to use capitalization to make its domain easier to read.

SFbrewersguild.org – this organization ‘gets it’. When you type in SFbrewersguild.COM, it forwards to the .org.

None – this may be tough to decipher in the photo, but there’s no domain. This person is using a Yahoo email address on their flyer. I see this a lot, even when a firm has its own domain name. Setting up email for your domain is relatively easy and makes a bit impact.

None – if you can figure out this psychic’s web address, then you probably don’t need to go see a psychic.

JustAwesomeTheWebsite.com – it’s a good thing this photo didn’t turn out well, since it’s painful. Just Awesome sells board games. Thankfully, the store also owns JustAwesomeGames.com. Maybe it’s using this long and painful domain to track traffic, but I don’t like it.