Nov
07
Picking the Right Rockin’ Domain Name for Your Church Web Site
ByIf you have not already purchased a domain name β the URL (Web site address) that people will type into their browser to find you on the Internet β for your church, then I want to briefly suggest some ideas for the choosing an Internet address that is easily identifiable with your church and maximizes your exposure to guests and your community.
Here are some ideas/suggestions for your consideration:
- Avoid abbreviations, whenever possible β they usually only communicate with your existing congregation
- Avoid excessively long names — or ones that aren’t easy to remember
- Incorporate a buzz word — choose a word or phrase from your mission statement or something your church is well known for in the community. One example is National Community Church. Since they meet in theaters across Washington, D.C., they use TheaterChurch.com
- Use .COM instead of .ORG β A lot of people may disagree with me. But the .COM domain name extension is the most used and widely known of all the extensions. Most people will sometimes assumes itβs .COM. I’ve also seen more churches even use .TV extensions lately, but I still say go with .COM.
Here are some other things to remember when buying a domain name:
- Make sure the church, not a member or another person or hosting company, is listed as the official owner of the domain name
- Remember to keep your domain name registration contact information up to date
- Remember to renew the domain name
- And just to be sure, go ahead and buy multiple years
Register a domain name for your church or ministry here with Church Communications Pro’s Web site hosting services.
One other suggestion would be that if you insist on the .ORG name, purchase the .COM name as well. Cybersquatters and other bad guys may buy it with the knowledge that people type the name with .COM first. $9.95 a year is cheap insurance from confusing your visitors or (worst case) having your visitors end up on a porn site parked on the .COM domain.
We use .NET at our church. The .COM is taken by another church, and I’ve been considering purchasing the .ORG.
Unfortunately, our website (fbclp.net) is an abbreviation of our church name. In the future, if I design another site, I plan on getting more creative because abbreviations are boring.
I think your comment about using a .com rather than a .org is misleading and inaccurate. You state as fact that .com is the most widely known and therefore a church should use it. However, I don’t see any citation as to where you get your facts from. As far as I know, you made that up.
The fact is that .ORG is established as the standard for non-commercial organizations in RFC 920, published in 1984. It is also fact that the TLD (top-level domain… the .org part) has no bearing on search engine rankings as they are instead influenced by the presence of keywords in the domain name or meta-tags in the site pages.
It is proper form for a church to use .org as their public-facing domain name. (web site & e-mail addresses) After all, in practice it is only something that goes on letterhead and business cards.
It is also proper for them to register the additional common TLDs such as .com and .net (.net is technically for networks and ISPs) yet forward those to the .org domain. In this way, your public address is the proper .org domain but if someone inadvertently types in a .com, they’ll still get to your domain.