Personal Domain Names & Why you Should Own Yours

It still surprises me the number of people I meet who do not own their personal domain name. I own:
dickiearmour.com
dickiearmour.co.uk
dickiearmour.me.uk
richardarmour.co.uk
and my wife and daughter have their personal domain names too.

A domain name is a finite source. There can only be one dickiearmour.co.uk and once it's been registered no one else can get it, as long as I renew it at the time of renewal, or I forget to renew it! You never know when you might want to use your own domain name and if you haven't protected it by registering it, then you could be disappointed when the time comes that you do want to use it and try to register it.

The obvious two main uses of a personal domain name are for:

1. Email
   and/or
2. A website

You Don't have to use your Broadband email address!
When you get broadband you automatically get an email address from your broadband provider. So if I was with BT or Sky my email address might be dickie.armour@sky.com or dickiearmour134@btinternet.com. Now that's all well and good but what happens when I change broadband provider to say Orange? I lose my old email account and have to set up a new email address with Orange and then go through all the hassle of telling my friends and family, many of whom won't remember and will still continue to send emails to you at your old email address!

With your own personal domain name this doesn't happen. I'm with Tiscali - now TalkTalk - for my broadband and even though I do have a tiscali.co.uk email address I never use it. I don't need to. I use an email address on my personal domain name - dickiearmour.me.uk. So if and when I change broadband providers it makes no difference to me that TalkTalk will delete my old tiscail.co.uk email account because I don't use it. And, I won't have to bother telling my friends, family and business contacts because they all use my dickiearmour.me.uk email address already.

My wife rides dressage horses and has represented GB on numerous occasions; in March 2007 on The Spanish Sunshine Tour, August 2007 at Hickstead and May 2009, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. She hasn't got a website but does have a personal domain name which she uses for email. But she is now considering getting a website designed and as a rider she wants to use her own name for the website because like most sports people they promote themselves using their brand - their own name. So she has no worries on that score because she's already got her own domain name!

Update: 2013
My wife now does have a website - www.nicolacooper.co.uk   

Perhaps there will come a time when you want to set up a website on your own personal domain name. You might want to start blogging and use your own name for your blog or perhaps you are a business coach or a consultant or a trainer. It makes sense to use your own name as your business and therefore a personal domain name would be needed. 

The other area where I'm a huge advocate of getting a personal domain name is for our children. I bought the .co.uk and .com in our daughter's name and I'm really pleased I did. She is already beginning to use it with friends at school and even had to send her maths teacher an email of some photos of shapes last week. He was so impressed she had her own email address! I bought her domain names soon after she was born. It appears there is a Doctor in the Midlands with the same name. After a year or so I got a phone call from her asking if I was prepared to sell my daughter's domain name as she wanted to use it! There can only ever be one version on any domain name extension and my daughter has all the main ones for her name. I politely declined the doctor and so she'll have had to look for alternative domain names. 

In America there has been a trend of buying domain names for newborn babies since about 2007. See this article from the Fox News website - Parents Rush to Register Newborn Babies' Internet Domain Names and I'm surprised more people here in the UK don't do this. The children of today and tomorrow are going to be living and breathing the Internet and will no doubt have websites and blogs of their own. The other thing you can do with your own domain name is point it to your Facebook, Twitter or whichever social network page of your choice. With the younger generation embracing these social networks I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. 

So protect your's and your children's Internet identity today and get your personal domain names before someone else does.