Degrees
Good, better, best.
Grammar has three degrees of comparison. Web addresses have them too. Here is how they differ in the places that matter to a working business: the phone, the van door, the invoice and the inbox.
The three forms, side by side.
| Situation | Positive: yourtrade-pros.net | Comparative: getyourtrade.co | Superlative: yourtrade.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| Said aloud on a call | Needs spelling out, hyphen included | People hear ".com" and add the m | Said once, typed right |
| Typed from memory | The hyphen and the extra word get dropped | The "get" goes missing | It is what they would guess anyway |
| Email addresses | Long, and easy to mistype | Replies sometimes land at the .com owner | Mail meant for you reaches you |
| Printed on a vehicle or sign | Hard to read at a distance | Fine, until someone looks it up | Short enough to remember from a glance |
| What it tells a reader | A company that got there late | A company that settled | The company the words describe |
The quiet cost of the second-best form.
Nobody notices the cost of a near-miss address on the day it is chosen. It shows up later, a little at a time. A customer who types the obvious version and finds someone else. A quote request that bounces. An invoice email that goes to whoever owns the plain .com.
None of these is dramatic. Together they are why so many companies move to the plain form once they can, and why they rarely move back.
When the plain form is not worth it.
We would rather say this up front than waste your time.
- Your customers never type your address
- If nearly all of your work comes from referrals or a marketplace, a new address changes little.
- The words do not describe you
- A name only earns its keep when it says what you actually do, in the words your customers use.
- You are about to rename the company
- Settle the name first. The address follows it, not the other way round.
If none of those applies, ask about a name.