Be Careful Which Domain Name You choose

This is an amusing article from the Sunday Times (UK) about unlucky businesses that did not choose their domains wisely.

Osodit.com – the unseen howlers in web addresses

WHEN Big Al’s bowling alley and restaurant wanted a jaunty name for its website, I Love Big Al’s seemed the obvious choice.

It was only when the site was up and running that the horrible truth dawned: run the words together and you might also attract visitors looking for women who swing both ways — I Love Bi Gals.

The business, in Vancouver, Washington state, is one of the tamer entries in a new compendium of websites whose names seemed safe enough at the time, but become somewhat unfortunate when strung together as a web address.

With hindsight, the compilers of a list of celebrity agents called Who Represents would probably have thought twice about calling their website whorepresents.com.

Les Bocages, a team of British tree surgeons working in Brittany, might also have chosen something other than the French word for “groves” — especially if they’d seen it written as lesbocages, which conjures up an altogether different image.

And spare a thought for the Mole Station nursery, a garden products company in New South Wales, Australia, whose web address used to be molestationnursery. It has now been changed to the not-at-all-amusing molerivernursery.

“In a world without spaces we mentally insert our own,” said Andy Geldman, a software designer and author of Slurls: They Called Their Website What? “And you might not stick yours where I stick mine.”

His book lists more than 150 such sites, anything from American Scrap Metal (or americanscrapmetal) to ustinc.com.

Website names have inspired pranksters. At first glance you might think that Powergen, the energy firm, had made a terrible error with the site of its Italian branch: powergenitalia. Actually it has nothing to do with Powergen.

There is also suspicion that Pen Island, a firm that apparently offers a range of bespoke pens, knew exactly what it was doing when it named its website penisland.net.

Geldman has coined the name Slurls for such ambiguities, combining the words “slur” and “url”, which means uniform resource locator and is the technical term for an internet address.

Most of the ambiguities prompt the response: what were they thinking? Log on to menlove.com and you do not expect to find the site of a Toyota dealer in sleepy Utah. Likewise, would you feel comfortable as a hotel owner renting bedlinen from ladrape.co.uk? Yet this is the site of a Cheshire firm.

Most website owners seem to be philosophical about the ambiguity. A spokesman for therapistfinder, which lists therapists in California, sighed and then admitted: “We have received a few bizarre phone calls.”

Others fail to see the funny side. A spokesman for Choose Spain, a company offering holiday villas on its website, called choosespain.com, said flatly: “It was too late to change it once we realised.”

Sometimes it takes a while for the horrible truth to sink in. When Michelle Aisworth was setting up her mobile dog-grooming service in Warwickshire, she wanted a name that explained what the company was all about. So she chose doggiestyles for her website, completely unaware, she says, of its sexual meaning.

“I chose it because if you separate the ‘doggie’ and the ‘styles’, that’s exactly what the business does,” she said.
“The ambiguity only occurred to me after I set up the website, when I Googled it.”

So the moral is this: when choosing a name for your business in this cyber age, always think how it would read on a web address. If all else fails, just look it up on Go Ogle.

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From The Sunday Times

May 30, 2010
Roland White