In general we encourage clients just to have one website, we think its generally a waste of money to buy the .com the .co.uk the .org.uk and the .net versions of your website name. We believe one website that is correctly built and promoted will be adequate for most websites. We do have clients requesting that we buy the hyphenated and un-hyphenated versions of their website name also and again we state this is generally a waste of money apart from major brands who get a lot of directly typed in URLS where typos can occur. A standard business brochure site that is UK based and wants to sell only to the UK should always try to obtain the .co.uk domain of their choice.
Additionally there is a word of caution here for the unwary.
One of our clients recently told us that they ‘found out’ that they were losing email inquires to the non-hyphenated URL of their website name (example info@deliciouswebdesign.com instead of info@delicious-webdesign.com). They claimed to be worried and to have had no idea whether one or a load of enquiries went through to the non-hyphenated version of their website. They were approached via email from a company that ‘claimed he was getting the companies email and was ‘reluctant’ to sell the domain name, initially, the company went on to tell me that they bought the domain and said they were very happy as it has now been resolved as they bought the domain name for £100.
Unfortunately this is a scam (unless you really have given out your email address incorrectly or made a mistake on the website with the email name (which we hadn’t), so we had to tell the company that it looked like they have fallen to a well worked scam. We know this as the email address wasn’t given out incorrectly nor was it incorrect on the website or in any directories and we often get offered similar domain names for £100 and are told that they are getting our email inquiries that should be destined to our websites. This ‘reluctant selling company’ often simply buy the site for £3 and sell it for £100, which is clearly a very nice profit. I had to tell the company that nowhere on their site was there mention of the non-hyphenated version of their email address so what the ‘reluctant seller was’ claiming was definitely not correct. We added the caveat that it is possible they had added their email address incorrectly on a directory or another listing.
As with any ‘out of the blue’ or ‘too good to be true offer’ If the company had asked us first we would have taken time to look into it before giving our recommendation. In this instance the company fell for a well worked scam that made someone a huge percentage profit for writing an email.
