What a difference a hyphen and an "s" make. InterNIC or whoever is registering domain names needs to pay me a cut of the action for today's topic. We're not going to look at bad design, but some marketing problems you might face if you don't grab variations of your domain name.
In the book version of this site I mentioned it's a very good idea to acquire domain names with multiple variations of spelling and punctuation. For example, if you're cowboy.com (I'm sure there is such a site, I haven't looked at it and I'm just using it as an example), then you need to also get cowboys.com, cow-boy.com, and cow-boys.com. Shoot, you might even need to get kowboy.com and its variations.
Don't believe me? Well, here's a real live example folks. If this doesn't scare the living bejesus out of you and get your little fingers going to the domain registrar of your choice, nothing will. As far as I can tell, these sites are owned by different folks and are involved in different activities.
www.coolpages.com
www.coolpage.com
www.cool-pages.com
www.cool-page.com (since I wrote this, it looks like coolpage.com and cool-page.com have joined forces)
These sites were registered on February 10, 1996, November 15, 1996, January 29, 1997, and October 5, 1998 — but not necessarily in that order.
I realize a lot of porno sites grab misspellings of other companies, but that's not the lesson I'm trying to teach here.
Just for grins, here's two more sites, owned by different folks, who wish probably wished they used a little more foresight: garden.com (which, I believe, is now defunct but points to Burpee) and gardens.com
Make sure you actually own your domain name. When you have a company — generally an ISP — register your domain name they are supposed to put you down as "registrant." — the owner of the domain name. In 99.999 percent of the cases, they do it correctly, but there are those circumstances — intentional or unintentional — where the ISP ends up putting themselves down as the "registrant." If this happens and you later want to change ISPs, they've got you in between a rock and a hard place. At the very least, it's going to be ugly.
The easy way to find out if you actually own your domain name is to go to InterNIC and check to see if your name is listed as "Registrant" at the top of the page. The address is http://www.internic.net/whois.html and if your name is not there, you better have a nice discussion with your attorney.