Judging Domains in a San Francisco Laundromat

A non-scientific look at small business domain names.

This past Labor Day, while vacationing in San Francisco, I found myself feeding quarters into a washer in a laundromat. (Ah, the joys of traveling with a three-year-old). Perhaps it was a fitting situation, since I own both SanFrancisco.us and Laundromats.us.

With nothing to do except watch the dryer spin, I started to analyze the flyers papered to the walls. It was encouraging that so many of the small businesses advertising in the laundromat had domain names. But it was discouraging to see how bad some of them were. Here are some of my observations:

laundromat-ripefruit

RipeFruitWriting.com – Sure, it’s a long domain. But I like how the flyer positions the domain name as the focus point. It allowed them to put the flyer at the very top of the wall but still have an impact.

laundromat-pantheater

PanTheater.com – it’s the logical domain for this theater. But it also looks like PantHeater.com (something I could have used on a cool San Francisco day). The theater should use capitalization to make its domain easier to read.

laundromat-sfbrewersguild

SFbrewersguild.org – this organization ‘gets it’. When you type in SFbrewersguild.COM, it forwards to the .org.

laundromat-yahoo

None – this may be tough to decipher in the photo, but there’s no domain. This person is using a Yahoo email address on their flyer. I see this a lot, even when a company has its own domain name. Setting up email for your domain is relatively easy and makes a bit impact.

laundromat1

None – if you can figure out this psychic’s web address, then you probably don’t need to go see a psychic.

laundromat2

JustAwesomeTheWebsite.com – it’s a good thing this photo didn’t turn out well, because it’s painful. Just Awesome sells board games. Thankfully, the store also owns JustAwesomeGames.com. Maybe it’s using this long and painful domain to track traffic, but I don’t like it.

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Comments

  1. September 11th, 2009 | 2:13 pm

    Judging Domains in a San Francisco Laundromat – http://tinyurl.com/la3txo

  2. September 12th, 2009 | 8:19 am

    DOMAINS Domain Name Wire » News » Judging Domains in a San Francisco …: A non-scientific look at small .. http://bit.ly/15MoTY

  3. September 14th, 2009 | 12:56 pm

    I have notice the same thing. Sometimes I will go to the University Library near me and have my son grab 5 magazine off the rack.

    This lets me see how others, in unrelated fields are using domain names.

    I see many different TLDs being used.

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