More Bad Domain Names
More examples of poorly chosen firm domain names.
My wife took over the home office this past weekend to sort through a few hundred business cards that were scattered across her desk. One of the business cards caught my eye. It was for a firm called Mingle. Or at least I think that’s how you pronounce it. The firm’s domain name is — get ready for this — Minggl.com. Ouch.
I decided to look through her cards to find other examples of bad domain names. Many times the firms have good names, it’s just that they have poor domain names. Here are some that caught my eye:
Awind: The firm name is fine, but you have to go to awindinc.com to find its web presence. There’s another firm (non-competing, thank goodness) that operates at awind.com.
Future Works: I like the firm name, even though it seems I’ve heard of a number of firms with names like this. To find the firm you’ll have to type in Future-Works.com with a hyphen. Much like Awind, FutureWorks.com is owned by an existing firm.
Giftag: Giftag is a Best Buy venture. But if you try to find it by spelling it correctly as GiftTag.com, you’ll end up at a one of Frank Schilling’s parked pages. You’ll have to go to Giftag.com with one ‘t’ to find the firm.
FortressWare: This one is really painful. To find this firm you have to go to Fortessw.com. I would think that when you brainstormed this firm name and you found FortressWare.com unavailable, you’d try to buy it ahead of settling on the firm name.
Web 2.0 .tv: This isn’t a firm, just a web site. The firm behind it is really good. But this name is tough and brings up an issue lots of people face: “how do I deal with web 2.0 in domain names?” I’ve seen people display it as “20” in domains. In this case the domain is web2point0.tv. I usually refer to it as “web 2 dot 0”, so this choice confuses me. The simple answer for people struggling with the 2.0 thing is: don’t use it in your domains.
