Dot KIWI conundrum
Published May 1st, 2014 under General
Edit: The domain is now live 🙂
As some of you may know, I am a proud Kiwi (ie: a person from New Zealand). This fad of buying fancy TLD’s seemed a little silly to me until the .kiwi.nz domain name was announced. I missed out on ryan.kiwi.nz at the time, had an offer to buy it from the owner, but the plain .kiwi TLD was then announced and so I waited two years for it to become available; which happened today!
I am now the proud owner of both the ryan.kiwi and hellyer.kiwi domain names 🙂
My original plan was to use http://ryan.kiwi/ for my personal website (and sub-domains like the one you are on right now), but ryan at hellyer dt kiwi for my email address. But my goto guy for domain questions, Donnacha Mac Gloinn, suggested that maybe I should reevaluate that, as perhaps the switcheroo of email and website domains may confuse people, and the domain name hellyer.kiwi is potentially more memorable since there are lots of Ryan’s in the world, but not so many Hellyer’s.
Sooo, the purpose of this blog post … what would you do if you were me?
- Option A: Website: ryan.kiwi; Email ryan at hellyer dot.kiwi
- Option B: Website: hellyer.kiwi; Email ryan at hellyer dot.kiwi
- Option C: Website: ryan.kiwi; Email me at ryan dot.kiwi
- Option D: Website: Something different entirely?
A Kiwi crossing in the North Island of New Zealand. Photo was stolen from King David.
Note: Eating Kiwi’s is illegal! A grapefruit is not a grape, therefore a kiwifruit is not a kiwi. A real Kiwi is either a person or one of the slow birds shown below, which can not see, hear or fly; eating either is a criminal offence.
A baby Kiwi. You are not allowed to eat these!
Photo stolen from fruitsbenefits.com.
Thomas says:
B
May 1, 2014 at 6:09 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks Thomas 🙂
May 1, 2014 at 6:21 pm # //
Linda says:
All norwegians will think that you have opened your own grocery store 🙂 I would say A.
May 1, 2014 at 6:18 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks Linda 🙂
I was totally weirded out when I was sitting at home in New Zealand, and looked up Google street view where I was going to be working in a few weeks time, and here was a giant green “KIWI” sign right outside. I was like “WTF? They put up a giant sign up to welcome me?”
May 1, 2014 at 6:19 pm # //
Cameron says:
Hellyer is not so very transcribable compared to ryan, but it does have that “hell yeah, kiwi!” ring to it. I would say C, but get gmail to do your email.
May 1, 2014 at 6:22 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks Cameron 🙂 And yep, I’d definitely have gMail handle my email for me. Email servers scare me a little!
May 1, 2014 at 6:22 pm # //
Eren says:
ryan.hellyer.kiwi ryan@hellyer.kiwi hellyer.kiwi redirects to ryan.hellyer.kiwi
May 1, 2014 at 6:24 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks Eren. Interesting idea.
I also have a bunch of sub-domains though, currently including:
https://random.hellyer.kiwi./
https://geek.hellyer.kiwi/
https://nb.hellyer.kiwi/
Plus other archived junk.
So I’d need some way to factor those in too.
May 1, 2014 at 6:24 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Kailey Lampert suggested something similar to this on Twitter.
May 1, 2014 at 6:27 pm # //
Geir says:
B
May 1, 2014 at 6:25 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks 🙂
May 1, 2014 at 6:28 pm # //
Donnacha says:
B
May 1, 2014 at 6:25 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Donnacha, that has to be the shortest comment I have ever seen you write 😛
May 1, 2014 at 6:29 pm # //
Donnacha says:
Ha, I was merely pausing for breath Ryan
In terms of simple domain value, ryan.kiwi certainly has that “Wow, you managed to get your name!” gleam to it … but …
… in terms of building a personal brand, you ideally want people to remember your unusual surname rather than your relatively common first name: if they search for Ryan, they will find 180,000,000 results and you are nowhere to be found in the first few pages of results, and there is not much you will be able to do to change that anytime soon.
If, on the other hand, they search for Hellyer, they will find you right there on page one, and probably result one when the SEO-power of your domain with that exact word kicks in.
“Ryan” is shorter that “Hellyer” but only by 3 characters and, I would argue, is actually harder to remember – “ryan” will get jumbled up in people’s memories with “john” and other short, common first names.
Hellyer is utterly distinctive while still remaining comfortably short, and do not underestimate the positive value of the “Hell, Yeah!!” mnemonic that Cameron Kerr pointed out.
Once you decide which domain better serves those vital goals, of making you easy to remember and easy to find, you should go all-in on that and use it, consistently, for ALL services, keeping the other absolutely hidden and quietly forwarding.
As a final argument for choice B, I would point out that, if your career and notoriety continues to grow, you may eventually want / need to acquire the .com version – with a relatively small pile of cash, you can probably acquire hellyer.com whenever you want, but you have practically zero chance of ever acquiring ryan.com, even for millions.
May 1, 2014 at 6:54 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Yes, that’s more like the comments I recall from you Donnacha 😉
May 1, 2014 at 6:55 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
hellyer.com was offered to me for US$800 and I turned it down. They turned down my offer of US$400. To be honest, with hellyer.kiwi, I don’t see much need for hellyer.com anymore. Even if I had hellyer.com, I probably wouldn’t do much more than forward it to the .kiwi anyway. Dot Kiwi says more about me personally than .com ever could. The advantage I see in .com would be that people might accidentally type it in or simply remember it easier that way.
May 1, 2014 at 7:01 pm # //
Donnacha says:
Honestly, regardless of how much hype and wishful thinking surrounds the introduction of new TLDs, .com will overwhelming remain the TLD that human memories, in all their spectacular frailty, default to.
In fact, if anything, the stupefyingly ridiculous number of new TLDs, all already thoroughly squatted, strengthen the entrenched value of .com.
May 1, 2014 at 7:26 pm # //
Jason says:
Agreed on the TLD’s — though really; and I’m a bit of a heretic on this (I know, big shock) — as the domain shouldn’t be THAT important, so long as it’s CONSISTENT. That’s my main problem is having a different mail domain than the site? That’s just silly.
As much as the SEO-tards and their noodle-doodle BS try to claim otherwise, the most important thing on a website is “content of value presented in as accessible a manner as possible” — and no matter how many sleazeball scam artists try to argue otherwise or discredit him, that’s EXACTLY what Matt Cutts meant and developers who have any blasted clue have been parroting for over a decade with “Write for the user, not for the engine”.
Fretting over the domain name is often a waste of time; zoosk, hulu, google, yahoo, amazon, ebay — they’re gibberish that tells you nothing about what the sites ARE…. YET, they are some of the most successful websites out there. HOW?
CONTENT OF VALUE. No matter what SEO-tards and artsy fartsy types will try to tell you, that’s the most important thing on a site, everything else is window dressing! That’s where 99% of your efforts should be going — unique content of value people want. Wasting time on idiotic fiction like “keyword research” or “paid promotion” does more damage than good, no matter how many sleazy scam artists have made it industry standard practice. The same goes for “gee ain’t it neat” scripttardery or PSD jockey “drawing goofy pictures before you even have semantic markup” BULLSHIT.
Content of value, marked up semantically, progressively enhanced to provide graceful degradation, following accessibility guidelines… end of story. Anything else is 100% grade A farm fresh cow pies.
May 1, 2014 at 7:27 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
I somewhat agree Jason, but I think it’s important for companies to have a domain which is easy to remember, hence Yahoo!, Google etc. make sense. ryan.hellyer.kiwi on the other hand is a little long winded and requires people to remember something much longer, whereas hellyer.kiwi is hopefully somewhat shorter.
My main reason for wanting the domain change though is just because of the “cool” factor of having something short and descriptive. It’s not like I’m making any (direct) money out of my website(s), so it’s more cosmetic than practical.
May 1, 2014 at 7:33 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
I thought I was going to struggle to get people talking about this. Nice to see I was wrong 🙂
May 1, 2014 at 7:28 pm # //
Jason says:
B — branding and consistency.
May 1, 2014 at 6:41 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks Jason 🙂
May 1, 2014 at 6:41 pm # //
Trepmal says:
I’d lean toward ryan.hellyer.kiwi (maybe ryan.kiwi as a redirect) with ryan at hellyer as the email
May 1, 2014 at 6:45 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks. How would you factor in my sub-domains, like geek.hellyer.kiwi?
May 1, 2014 at 6:46 pm # //
Trepmal says:
I’d probably go with geek.hellyer.kiwi
May 1, 2014 at 6:46 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Thanks:) What would you put at the root of the hellyer.kiwi domain?
May 1, 2014 at 6:46 pm # //
Trepmal says:
I was thinking about that… either a redirect to whatever your “main” site is, or a portal if you have a lot of sub-sites
May 1, 2014 at 6:47 pm # //
Kim says:
I was going to suggest using it as a portal also – list sites in network w/links to last 5 posts for each one.
May 1, 2014 at 6:48 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
I only have two active blogs. Another is just for less interesting junk and the rest are archives, or not in English.
May 1, 2014 at 6:48 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Could still work, but it’d be a portal of two blogs with recent posts perhaps, plus some links to inactive/boring blogs
May 1, 2014 at 6:49 pm # //
Trepmal says:
could incorporate twitter feed or other stuff too
May 1, 2014 at 6:50 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
This could work. I hadn’t really considered this as an option in the past.
May 1, 2014 at 6:51 pm # //
Kim Parsell says:
All that and excerpt of your about page with link to full page. Lots of possibilities.
May 1, 2014 at 6:52 pm # //
Kim says:
I was going to suggest using it as a portal also – list sites in network w/links to last 5 posts for each one.
May 1, 2014 at 6:48 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
So it seems that everyone is choosing hellyer.kiwi for my website. I chose ryan.kiwi, but I’ll trust the unwashed masses on this
Eren and Kim and Kailey (on Twitter) have suggested that I have my “main” blog as ryan.hellyer.kiwi. This would allow me to do a portal on the root hellyer.kiwi domain, perhaps including my recent blog posts from various sub-domains, plus Twitter feeds, my about page etc.
So question #2:
(A) Portal at hellyer.kiwi, with blog at ryan.hellyer.kiwi
(B) blog on hellyer.kiwi
May 1, 2014 at 7:15 pm # //
Donnacha says:
#2: A – because you can then build it out in unexpected directions, such as giving future family members their own subdomains for their own blogs etc.
May 1, 2014 at 7:18 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Ohhh, that’s a good point Donnacha!
May 1, 2014 at 7:19 pm # //
Donnacha says:
You have to plan for future generations, Ryan
May 1, 2014 at 7:19 pm # //
Josh says:
Not read other comments, but I like hellyer@ryan.kiwi. Reading it sounds a bit like ‘Hell yeah, Ryan the kiwi!’
May 1, 2014 at 7:16 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
Hahaha, well that’s a new one. Hadn’t even of that option before.
May 1, 2014 at 7:16 pm # //
Josh says:
Your personal brand could all be based around ‘Could I get a Hell Yeah’ – sweet call to action on your website.
May 1, 2014 at 7:17 pm # //
Harriet says:
On the SEO point Jason is right, but is that really what you are going for anyway? I would go for memorability and simplicity as i think for the most part you will tell people to go to your site in some manner or other (links, in person, business cards) or people will search your name because they met you. Do correct me if i am wrong there.
So on that front, a) definitely same email and website domain and b) what will people remember the easiest? You’d be surprised at how many people get a last name wrong, whether its an Irish mess like mine or even something simple. But people are less likely to forget ryan.kiwi! And getting in their first is cool.
Also i think its fine to have ryan@ryan.kiwi – then people know they are getting THE ryan of the site! People mentally separate the before and after @ parts just fine i think. Or you could do hello@ryan.kiwi
If you are going for easy to find when people search your name, subdomains are not so great as they are seen a seperate sites, so ryan.kiwi/blog is better than blog.ryan.kiwi. Also people will probably search your full name so if anythif ryan.hellyer.kiwi is probably best in that regard! Potentially keep that and redirect (or ensure it is a portal to direct) to the new site?
Finally, you can also get all combinations and just redirect them. Then you can test out what feels right when you talk to people, and have it as a catch all in case people are getting it wrong.
May 1, 2014 at 9:15 pm # //
Ryan Hellyer says:
SEO is mostly meaningless. The only person googling my name is probably me 😛
I agree with the short easy to remember domain name. That was always my opinion as well, but it seems most people disagree with that.
I wouldn’t have ryan.kiwi/blog/ or blog.ryan.kiwi. I’d just have ryan.kiwi on it’s own. The sub-domains would be for my more specific sites, like geek.hellyer.kiwi and random.hellyer.kiwi. Or in the case of hellyer.kiwi, then it could be ryan.hellyer.kiwi for my personal blog.
May 1, 2014 at 9:15 pm # //
Harriet says:
Yeah i thought that was the case. I only suggest it in case you think it could be good to just tell people you meet to google your name, knowing that you will be top result. Ie if networking and meet someone with a cool job opportunity, or on your travels you want to tell someone the photos you just took will be online etc. But i think ryan.kiwi is probably the most memorable and will satisfy that need.
May 1, 2014 at 9:53 pm # //
Harriet says:
Then you will seem really iconic, like you are THE ryan who is a kiwi that all the world should know haha
May 1, 2014 at 9:53 pm # //