Many Nigerian businesses and business owners are always in a bit of a hurry when creating their first website. This in turn leads to a lot of mistakes owing to lack of research or improper planning.

The most basic of problems you would face when bringing your business online is probably picking the perfect website address, you don’t want it to be too long, too boring or too forgettable. It gets more complicated when you now have to pick GTLD’s.

— A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. —

Do you want your website to say .com .ng .net .org .group .school .book or any of the other hundreds of options available to you? How do you decide which of the gTLD’s happen to be the best for your business keeping in mind this is one of the decisions you may have to stick with permanently for proper branding. You don’t want to move your website to a new gTLD every month because you simply discovered a cooler gTLD. NO!

Many will argue .com is the best; it is by far the most popular gTLD and most widely used. Very easy to remember as well so it’s a no brainer right? They may be right in most cases but under some circumstances this may not be the case at all. What happens when your business is only for Nigerians by Nigerians and you truly have no business with international clients in Peru or Australia? Wouldn’t a .ng or .com.ng domain be more suited in this case? CONTINUE READING