Choosing a URL for Your Nonprofit Organization

It used to be that when you wanted to launch a web site, you simply picked the name you wanted, registered it, and put up a few pages of content. In the past decade or so, however, things have gotten a whole lot more complicated. Cute, fun, amateur-looking web sites are definitely out, for example.

There are a zillion places to register your site these days, too. But perhaps one of the most annoying little details of finally choosing to launch a site is the fact that it’s actually kind of difficult to pick a URL.

With millions upon millions of web sites out there, it makes sense that it would be getting harder to find a decent URL that isn’t already in use. While it may seem obvious to use your organization’s name, there are plenty of nonprofits that have been frustrated to find out that another organization with the same or a similar name has already beat them to the punch. What happens then often includes adding more and more words, hyphenating, or some other “tricky” method of getting your name to work. Unfortunately, these types of URLs are not very effective. After all, people don’t remember really long web addresses, and they rarely think to put hyphens between words.

Read the full article here.

By LORNA DOONE BREWER

Publication: Nonprofit Technology News

Published: September 17, 2010