Branding helps customers remember your company. A recognized brand forms a positive impression of your brand and company and helps build confidence in their buying decisions. Most websites are built to inform or act as an online retailing shop. A good website that comes with a good domain name reflects well on the brand and the company.
When choosing a domain name, it is advantageous that it is either an exact match of the brand name, a similar name to your brand or a description that leads to an understanding of your business. If the chosen name is not reflective enough of your brand, your potential customers may be led to a competitor's site with a more relevant name instead. Very often it is better to choose a meaningful, catchy and non-hyphenated name that is easy to pronounce and spell, making it easier to remember and minimising typo mistakes. For example 'hotcoffee.com.sg' is better than 'hcab' to represent hot coffee and bread for a cafe. Using plurals or the article 'the' is not advisable too because people generally forget to type in the 's' or 'the' when searching the Internet or typing in the browser.
The extension (suffix) in a ccTLD refers to the part that comes after the dot in a domain name. In the domain name "hotcoffee.com.sg", "com.sg" is the extension.
ccTLDs would usually have a range of extensions in the third-level for a registrant to choose from. The third-level is the suffix that comes before the geographical reference, for example, "com" is the third-level of ".sg".
These third-level extensions represent certain industry group or practices. For example, "edu" represents 'education' for educational institutions. Such third level extensions can help the potential customer recognize what kind of product or service you provide. Usually for such extensions, there will be strict rules of qualification for registration, do check with the ccTLD registries for the rules.
Local language extensions are also available to provide sites that are in a local written language. For .SG, Chinese and Tamil extensions are available. Such local language extensions are known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and will give the option to visitors to read in their preferred language, hence connecting to a wider audience.
