Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry and working in the stone sector for more than a decade. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This time: Don’t get caught out with the change from .co.uk to .uk
Decisions, decisions. In this age of digital communications we are all confronted with innumerable choices on a daily basis. Just look at the myriad unsolicited emails we receive on a daily basis.
No matter how good you are at sorting the wheat from the chaff and hitting the delete button to clear out the junk, there’s one notification email you will probably receive in the coming weeks that really needs your attention. It will come from your domain name hosting company – that’s the company you registered your website with (1and1, Web Host UK, Go Daddy, 123, or any of a host of similar companies).
If you used another company to produce your website, the notification will probably come from them.
Two very important developments are about to take place and you should know what’s going on.
Firstly there’s the new ccTLD.
What’s that? It stands for ‘country code top-level domain’.
It’s the last two letters of a website address that denotes the country of origin. For example, www.mywebsite.ie denotes a website from Ireland; .it is for Italy; .fr France and so on. Except here in the UK, where we’ve had to use .co.uk because .uk has never been available. On 10 June that changed and .uk became available.
Before you start to panic about another company nicking your website traffic by registering your existing .co.uk address but with the .uk ending, new domain names will automatically be reserved for existing holders of the corresponding .co.uk websites.
To use my earlier example, if your website has been www.mywebsite.co.uk for a period of five years, you – and only you – will be able to register www.mywebsite.uk.
The powers that be have given us five years grace to register the name to avoid a frenzy of new website addresses, signage, livery, literature, business stationery and whatever you need to include the new website address on.
Your best bet is to register the name at the earliest opportunity then change over at your leisure, safe in the knowledge that no other company can take it. You could even run both .co.uk and .uk side by side if you want to.
Unfortunately, if you’ve registered org., .net, .biz or one of the other variations, the rules say the holder of .co.uk gets first refusal.
Most UK-based companies using the .com domain name have already registered .co.uk, but if you haven’t I suggest you do so, otherwise you could find the .uk domain name going to someone else. That’s a potential disaster if you run an e-commerce website (ie you sell directly from your website with a checkout and online payments) because most UK consumers prefer to buy from a .co.uk website than a .com one.
Even if you plan to continue with .com, it still makes sense to register .uk to prevent anyone nabbing it in the future.
That’s probably enough technical talk for now. I’ll explain the equally interesting developments with the nTLDs (new Top-Level Domains) in next month’s column.
In the meantime you can carry out some research of your own about the changes at www.dotuklaunch.uk