Just your target audience.
Domain investors—including myself—talk about how it’s important to have an easy-to-spell domain name. No cute spellings, no tricky words.
While this matters most of the time, one of the people I interviewed for this week’s podcast had a unique perspective.
Amanda O’Brien publishes a high-end travel blog at TheBoutiqueAdventurer.com.
I asked her if she thinks the word boutique ever causes problems because it’s frequently misspelled.
“I guess it comes down to who your target audience is,” she said. “What I’ve always been aiming for are people that stay in boutique hotels, that they know what that means.”
In O’Brien’s case, her target audience knows how to spell boutique because they stay in boutique hotels.
Yes, not everyone can easily spell the word. But her target audience can.
That’s a great perspective.
MIKE says
It;s easy of course , “BooTeek” there ya go.
Nick says
I vacation multiple times a year and stay in small luxury hotels once in a while, it really depends on the destination. However I never heard the term botique hotel, and don’t care enough to learn how to spell correctly. I guess the target audience isn’t really people that stay in luxury hotels and more the pretentsious of it all. I probably spelled that wrong too.
Alan Built says
There’s not just the misspelling aspect but there is the length that makes it a bad domain choice at 21 characters, not to mention based on 3 words.
Andrew Allemann says
She addresses using ‘the’ in the podcast. It’s a bit long but when you consider how most people will find and consume the content on the site, it’s not a huge deal.
Andrew Allemann says
Email might be a pain at that length though
Alan Built says
Using “the” in a domain might be ok for theapple.com but obviously apple.com is even better.
Steve says
Great content. Nice design. I would rebrand to a name that can be trademarked — shorter and I’d go with a different frameworks — maybe Rails rather than PHP. I’d keep most of the widgets and all the plugins, but eliminate the widgets that are not driving traffic to have faster loads on mobile.
Just my thoughts, but I commend her on the content — well done – relevant, informative.
TH says
Simple spelling, name recognition, and memorability should only take precedence if the majority of site traffic comes from direct navigation. Just checked the site specs in Similarweb and traffic breaks out like this: 13% direct nav, 14% referrals, 33% social media, and 40% organic search. The smart focus here is on strategies that maximize conversion of social media and organic search traffic, not on re-branding with an ‘easier’ domain.
RaTHeaD says
have you ever considered ‘do it yourself’brain surgery?
Snoopy says
Direct navigation traffic is probably low because the name would take 5 tries and a dictionary to spell correctly.
Andrew Allemann says
Direct nav can include bookmarks
Snoopy says
Might be a positive perspective but I doubt it is an accurate one. People who stays at hotel like that would still be having alot of trouble with her domain.