This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

1 September. 2023. A part of my bad logos series. An issue related to your brand is how people find you online. You need to take a step back and take a look at what your domain name is saying as well.

I used to use the example of kiwi firm eZEBRA. Their domain name was ezebra.co.nz (or at least one of them was). I couldn’t even tell you what the business was about. I just remember writing the domain name on a whiteboard and asking an audience what they assumed the business sold. Everyone assumed bras or lingerie.

Pen Island Pens has the same problem. The brand is fine, but they need to be very careful with their domain name. PenIsland.net is not a great domain name (unless you get a buzz – and sales – out of the sniggers). Firstly, you’ll get people going to the .com as that is a far more common top-level domain extension. Fortunately, penisland.com currently (as of this writing) redirects to an online gambling site. I had assumed worse. Recollections of the old WhiteHouse.gov vs WhiteHouse.com came to mind (the .com used to be a porn site. It is now a political betting site).

Then there is the obvious problem with a domain name like PenIsland (and eZEBRA). Use hyphens to force the words you want used, so Pen-Island, e-ZEBRA are preferred versions. In the case of our pen company, however, Pen Island is a real place, albeit uninhabited (one of several uninhabited Canadian arctic islands in Nunavut, Canada located within southwestern Hudson Bay apparently), so there is potential competition for this name. Domain registration is a ‘first in, best fed’ model in most jurisdictions.

I would probably still keep the PenIsland.net domain, but redirect it to the friendlier, public facing domain.

The week after I used this slide in my pitch, I saw a post on Reddit that listed the ‘Top 7 Worst Website Names.’ In addition to Pen Island Pens were these:

1. Who Represents – www.whorepresents.com – A site to find out which agency represents a celebrity
2. Experts Exchange – www.expertsexchange.com – A website for people in IT to ask each other for tech help. This domain is now available as Experts Exchange have moved to esperts-exchange.com
3. Therapist Finder – www.therapistfinder.com – A site to finder a therapist. Doesn’t seem to be live any more
4. Mole Station Nursery – www.molestationnursery.com – An Australian grower of frost hardy native shrubs and farm trees. Their current domain is www.molerivernursery.com
5. Speed of Art – www.speedofart.com – A real website, but I can’t really tell what they do. I think it is a very old site, with a few dead links
6. Cumming First United Methodist Church – www.cummingfirst.com – I found no evidence the domain was for the church. It is now an Indonesian gambling site.
7. PowerGen Italia – www.powergenitalia.com – in researching the above sites, I found a reference to this Italian Power Generation equipment manufacturer. Similarly, Volkswagen Italy’s Instagram handle is @volkswagenitalia
8. Bonus! – an entry on the RationalWiki site on bad/embarrassing website names. Some appear to be intentional.

A domain name (or set of domain names) can be valuable IP for your company. Manage them well to maintain and build that value.