What Do All The Domain Name Extensions Mean?The internet is evolving every second of every day and extensions are one way we can see this in real time. Domain name extensions are essentially designed to name the types of sites you're building and give people an idea of what category your site is in. Some examples in the modern world are .tv where television stations put their sites, .com and .biz (business) where companies put their sites, .info (information sites), the latest is the .me domain name extension which is designed for people to put their name (first and last name dot me or first name dot me etc..). With this last option people who didn't hop aboard the .com bandwagon and found their name taken have a second opportunity to get their site name still. In the beginning, the webs original designers hoped that people would use the domain name extensions correctly so it would make it easy to tell what kind of site it was, thus search engines could easily categorize them for better search results in specific categories. People pretty much ignored this concept and bought the one that was the most popular. For many, the .com extension is a sign of prestige since it was the first and most used name. People were and still are putting everything under the .com extension. The top three are .com, .org, and .net. Realistically most sites out there should be .net, and non profit organizations should all use .org. The web builders are still trying to break people into the habit of using extensions and with so many .com's circulating it's near impossible to get a domain name with your favorite name without using a different extension. People are starting to catch on. More and more the extensions are starting to play a vital part in what people register. Some of the more common types of extensions available are: .Biz, .info, .me, .us, .co.uk, . name, .mobi, .pro, .tel, .ca (or your state initials). As the web grows people will be forced to use these other extensions in order to get the name they want. People are starting to get used to using other than .com, .org, and .net extensions. As this becomes common place the other extensions will start to become more popular than .com (at least this is the hope), and the web will evolve into a more organized url structure. The meanings of the domain extensions are pretty self explanatory as the letters used are often abbreviations of the word (first three letters of the word). For example in the list above .biz stands for "business" but is easily recognizable as such even with the z instead of an s, in fact bis would confuse people. .info is "information" .name and .me are personal sites, and so on. This is a fairly comprehensive list that is meant to explain the meanings and give definitions to domain name extensions. |