More examples of bad web company names.

It seems like I write about horrible web company domain names all the time. I have no idea how many times I’ve written about this, but I have a new crop to share with you.

Yesterday I attended the Rice Alliance Information Technology and Web 2.0 Venture Forum at Rice University in Houston. There were a few good businesses there, but some had truely horrible domain names that will cost them dearly in the long run.

The grand prize goes to Sk*rt, pronounced “Skirt”. They didn’t go with a web 2.0 spelling, such as skrt.com, which would be bad enough. What’s their domain name? Sk-rt.com. Yes, that’s not a typo. There’s a hyphen in their name. Imagine telling someone to visit your five character domain name and having to say, “it’s s, k, dash, r, t, dot com”.

That’s not to say that Sk*rt doesn’t have a good business. On the contrary, it get loads of traffic and is doing quite well. But here’s another problem. Skirt.com is a real, active web site. It’s for a women’s magazine. According to whois, Skirt.com and Sk-rt.com are owned by two different companies. If you visit Skirt.com, you’ll see some very similar fonts on skirt.com that are also on sk-rt.com.

Not only is Sk*rt sending typo traffic to Skirt.com, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Skirt.com sued Sk*rt. My advice would be to not do this; just sit back and enjoy the steady stream of well targeted traffic hitting your site! In fact, if Skirt.com adds the “digg” type functionality seen on Sk-rt.com, it could take a big chunk out of Sk*rt’s business.

Another mistake is using a similar sounding letter in the domain (k for c) or a .net for the main URL. And don’t get me started on PhatMath.com. Yes, there’s a company at FatMath.com, too.

My hat’s off to companies at the event with easy-to-pronounce and easy-to-remember domain names: SpendView.com, TipDish.com, IdeaTango.com, to name a few.

Related posts:

1. Sk*rt Skirts Losing Its Domain
2. Sk-Rt.com Does a “Kirtsy”