Customised websites – with a £50,000 price tag

Jul 3 2008 by Karen Dent, The Journal

Setting up a website ending in your business’s name or the sector in which you trade could soon become the norm. But customising your website won’t come cheap, as Karen Dent reports.

BUSINESSES could soon be setting up websites using their own specialised domain names, rather than relying on the traditional .com or .co.uk to attract visitors.

Icann – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which co-ordinates the web’s naming system – has approved the idea after a three-year study. The changes are likely to come into effect early next year after being rubber-stamped by the Icann board.

At the moment, anyone creating a website has 21 “top level” domains to chose from such as .com, .co.uk and .org but the new agreement means businesses will be able to apply to use their own names or select a suffix most appropriate to their sector, such as .travel.

There will also be the opportunity to set up top level city domain names such as .paris and .london – but there is no word yet on whether any businesses are considering bidding for a .newcastle suffix.

Icann president Dr Paul Twomey said: “The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the net. It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the internet.”

Dr Jim Terkeurst, director of the Institute of Digital Innovation (IDI) at DigitalCity in Middlesbrough, believes the additional domain names have become necessary as the net grows.

“The internet needs to be reorganised and I think this is a great first step,” he said. “There really needs to be more than a handful of domain names to be representative of people using it.

“The internet has become a huge business platform at a business-to-business and business-retail level.”

Pascal Fintoni, head of e-business at The North East Regional Portal which works to support regional online businesses, agrees that a greater choice of names is needed. “The ability to choose more suitable domain names will help small businesses become more competitive within national and international markets,” he said.

“Such changes are also likely to increase demand for businesses creating and managing the domain names, as well as benefiting exporters who are keen for domains that support multiple languages.”

But he added: “The proposal also raises question marks over the reaction of the search engines to the changes in the variety of domain names.”

Roddy Laing head of new media at Newcastle-based web design and advertising firm Guerilla Interactive, also extended a guarded greeting.

“I’ve heard it described as a bit like a gold rush, where people will be scrabbling around trying to grab their little piece of land. Personally, I think we should welcome it, but with an element of caution as well,” he said.

“Businesses should take a step back and make sure it is relevant to their businesses. It could be seen as another way to make money for domain name sellers. It is down to us as suppliers to educate businesses and relay what it does for them.”

And Julian Leighton, director of Orange Bus IT, a Newcastle web design company, questioned whether the changes would have much impact in the short term.

“Most businesses will certainly still want a .co.uk or .com address,” he said.

“There is a perceived benefit that all web companies would have a .web address for example, thus making them easier to find but in reality you need someone to police the system – yet it isn’t policed now, so what would change? .net was supposed to be for internet companies, .com for the US and so on.

“I can’t see it having much impact in the short term – and the long term is pretty tough to predict on the web!”

Customising your domain name will be an expensive business. Icann expects the cost of registering a new suffix to be in the region of £50,000. In comparison, a website ending .com can cost as little as £7 to register.

Icann hopes the high cost will prevent cybersquatters from snapping up names and selling them back to the relevant companies. There are no plans to automatically reserve trademarks but there will be an official system to allow brand name owners to object if another party registers their name.

Applications for new names will be considered during a limited initial evaluation period, followed by additional opportunities to apply.