Get a Domain Name

I was following a delivery van the other day for what purported to be a large successful business, International Floorings no less. (Name changed ever so slightly to avoid embarassment!) The two drivers appeared presentable and the almost New Toyota van was smartly painted in the company livery. So far so good. There was an 0800 contact number emblazoned across the back doors along with the full address of the company. All good stuff.

And there was a contact email address -

International-Floorings@Tiscali.co.uk

Oh dear. Here's an "International" organisation who are putting themselves out there in the business world and they don't even have their own business domain, website or email address!

Now, as we all know a domain name is a very cheap commodity - you can pick up domains at GoDaddy (and many, many other domain registrars)for as little as $1.99 on promotion, with dotcoms still available from just $9.99 per year. So it can't be the cost of the domain that is keeping this International business from having their own domain and all that goes with it.

Most people also know that with today's sophisticated domain parking services, you can get many of the benefits of having a website domain, without going to the time, trouble and expense of creating your own website even. You can set up your domain emails to forward to a convenient email that you use and check regularly. You can even set up a catchall email forwarder so everything addressed to your domain can get forwarder - unbeknownst to the sender, to your favourite Tiscali or AOL or whatever email address. So nope, can't be the domain that's stopping them.

But hosting a website or domain is no longer prohibitively expensive. Competition amongst webhosts has never been more fierce and deals abound at every turn. I use LunarPages for most of my domain hosting and they charge around $5 per month. Within that I get unlimited "addon domains" which means I can have them host as many domain names as I like, all under my one $5 account. Again, it's very easy to add a domain to your hosting and you can easily forward any emails addressed to any address at that domain to a convenient and easily checkable email address - for instance googlemail - so you don't even have to manage multipe email accounts, or get to cope with the dreaded outlook express!

So, International Floorings don't have a personalised email, but it can't be to save on the cost of a domain name - $9.99 a year. They don't have a domain name, but surely it can't be to save on the $60 a year domain hosting - this is an International business for goodness sake!

Well then it must be that they don't want to go to all the expense of getting a website designed and uploaded and all that stuff. After all, that would cost a small fortune wouldn't it - especially for an International company like theirs?

No - wrong again. You can build and publish a very respectable looking website in just a few minutes with Wordpress, which although a blogging platform has a useful feature portfolio for building web pages quickly and easily. (My webhosting article pages were built in a few minutes using wordpress and a couple of themes and plugins to demonstrate what I mean.) And Wordpress is free.

So, It's not the cost of a domain, not the cost of hosting that domain and it's not the cost of building and publishing their website that prevents International Floorings from having their website and personalised email contact details on the back of their van. (And saving costs is very praiseworthy in these hard times and you would be happy to deal with an organisation that was so careful with their costs after all.)

I have to conclude therefore that it is a lack of imagination that prevents them from doing all these things. Would you want to deal with an organisation that demonstrates such a lack of imagination?

Get a website - before it's too late.

http://www.indexofwebhosting.com