[Sigia-l] URLs and brands

[Mary Wisnewski]

Weird sidelines to consider..

1) If you register group1.com, will it bother you (your branding team?  the
group?) if someone else registers group1.net?  what about group1.co.uk?
Will it bother them if said site is a porn hub?  A competitor?  A
disgruntled ex-employee?

Domain name registration is a rather bottomless pit when you start thinking
about all the top level domains and countries.

And then for fun, you can add in punctuation changes, like group-name.com or
group-name-company.com or whatever.

2) If your groups do register domain names, make sure your corporate central
DNS contact is the registering party.  That way if anything changes in
future (group name?  group attachement to company), your central person can
keep up with the changes (and the need to continue to hold those names)

3) Speaking in favor of registration.. if the group in question ever spins
out, it will be easy to distance their new organization from the parent
company if they have been using groupname.com all along.


But the bigger issue/answer/consideration was brought up earlier:
structuring a web presence on the basis of org structure is probably not a
good long term strategy - and server naming just adds to the complexity.
So if you do register names, I would recommend using the registered domains
as window-dressing only. With invisible redirection to the real location,
www.company.com/group1


-mary
-- 
Mary Wisnewski, mwisnews at nortelnetworks.com
   "You should talk to her. She is a minefield of information."