Firm states fresh TLD is “cool”, but comes with drawbacks
Classic Engineering has a cool domain name, but founder Eduardo Umaña sometimes has to explain it to people.
A couple weeks ago I profiled Huemor, a firm that moved from a .com domain name to the fresh top level domain .Rocks.
Today I’m going to look at a more likely scenario: a firm choosing a fresh top level domain name since the .com was registered by now.
Eduardo Umaña chose the name Classic Engineering for his product design studio. But when he went to register the domain name, he found that ClassicEngineering.com was by now taken.
Then Umaña found that Classic.Engineering was available, so he registered the domain name. He set up a site on the domain to show off his first product, a line of watches.
“It is a really cool domain to own, but unfortunately, people are not aware of these fresh kinds of domains,” Umaña told Reglike. “I have issues of people attempting to reach classic.engineering.com. Once I explain that ‘.engineering’ is the fresh ‘.com’ people usually say something like ‘cool!’ and get the idea behind it.”
Umaña has also run into the issue of universal acceptance, especially with his @classic.engineering email address.
“Unfortunately, it is not recognized as a valid email when filling out forms or registering for some online services,” he stated.
He ends up using a .com email address in these cases.
User awareness and universal acceptance are two big issues fresh domain names have to overcome, and I’m sure Umaña’s experience is similar to other early adopters.
