Back in 2006, I only had a few event clients. During that time, most of my income resulted from working with small to medium businesses. There were numerous clients spread across multiple industries and many great lessons learned! Including what follows here.
When it came to new clients, almost every business needed to register a domain name and build a new website from scratch.
During a project, the business owner wanted me to register a couple of domain names. I asked the owner to email me which domains he wanted registered. After receiving the email, I copied and pasted the domain names into the domain registration search tool. Both domain names were available, so I proceeded to register the requested domains.
A few months went by before we started to build the client’s website. At that time, all websites were built on a dedicated development server. Once the client’s website was built and tested, we were ready to go live.
After we went live, the client had an issue accessing their site. In their own words, “I’m typing in my domain name, and the website is not coming up.”
Was the issue technical?
As I dug back through my project notes and emails, my heart skipped a beat and sunk into my stomach.
What happened?
The domain names were copied and pasted directly from the client’s email. And one of the domain names was misspelled.
Regardless of the unique spelling, the lesson learned was shame on me for not spell checking the domain name.
Since the domain registration lesson learned in 2006, every domain name that gets registered is triple checked for spelling. The process is straightforward.
If you’re going to register a new domain, break the domain name you want to be registered and spell-check each word.
superduperbeerfest.com … Super Duper Beer Fest (Spell check each word)
After your domain spelling checks out, then register you domain. Hopefully, it spares you the embarrassment and frustration above.
Additionally, if your domain name is difficult to spell, you might want to consider registering misspelled domains.
What seems like overly simplistic advice has saved my clients and myself multiple times since 2006.
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