There are many ways to make your business website look unprofessional but today I am going to talk about how your site’s URL can affect your web branding. A URL is what you type in to your browser URL bar to get to a certain website.
Using A Free Website
Have you ever looked for a company’s site only to find that it is hosted on some free site? For example, something that ends with a multiply dot com or wordpress dot com in their URL. One look and you will know that the site is hosted on a free website from Multiply or WordPress.
Don’t get me wrong and I am not saying that you should not do it but it should only serve as a secondary site with the purpose of networking. In fact, I do encourage this if it helps you connect to your target audience that is hanging out there.
Not Buying A Domain
With the prices of domain being very low nowadays, nothing should stop you from registering one. Don’t tell me you can’t afford to pay a small sum for the sake of your company’s branding. It’s just not acceptable.
Let’s say you took my advice and finally bought the domain name and now you are proud to show everyone how your URL looks like now. What is the worst thing you can do than not buying the domain name in the first place?
Using A Free Email Address
I find it very disgusting when I see a nice company website that has its own domain but when I looked for the contact email address, all I see is that they are using Hotmail or Gmail. You took the trouble to buy a domain but you did not set up your email to use that same domain.
Imagine that! I am at nice website and the email address to contact them is something that comes from Hotmail or Gmail. It really puts me off and make your company look very unprofessional.
What You Can Do
Use Google Apps for goodness sake. Google Apps is a suite of online applications and you can actually use it with your own domain.
