Economic Development Online - E-mail and Website Address

E-mail and Domain Names

One of the ongoing debates among government organizations is the use of domains. The most common domain extensions are .com, .net and .org. An established system for government organizations already exists and it doesn't look anything like these. Sometimes it is .gov, but the domain usually follows this format: city.nameoflocation.state.us.

Here are some examples:

City - http://www.ci.indianapolis.in.us
County - http://www.co.solano.ca.us
State - http://www.state.ia.us

Standardization should allow people who do not even know your web site to type in the standard URL and find you. But many people do not know about this standard. Instead they type in "indianapolis.com" and find a commercial site or cityofindianapolis.com" and find that someone is "cybersquatting" and trying to sell the name.

We recommend that you register your site using the standard government protocol. You can also register other names such as youcity.gov that lead to the same standardized (http://www.ci.indianapolis.in.us) domain. Keep in mind that there may be domain name squatters (people who register a domain just to sell it) out there waiting to charge you thousands of dollars for your own name. Or another city may have already taken it. Let's face it, there are a lot of City of Springfields out there.

Another reason to use the standard government protocal is that search engines and portals often exclude .com, .net or .org domains from their search of official government web sites. The current US federal portal web site only recognizes .gov or .mil sites. Soon other portals may only recognize .us sites. Because it is so important for your site to be found by search engines, this is one more reason to use the standard domain.

Here are examples of non-standard domain names that have been employed:

http://www.newlondonwi.org/
http://www.burlesontx.com/
http://www.peachtreecitygeorgia.com

Of course if you are a chamber of commerce or some other type of economic development organization you have much more flexibility when choosing your domain. Pick one that is easy, intuitive and works well for you.

Within your organization you may want to standardize people's names for e-mail. The level of standardization will likely be based on the number of employees in your organization. Some of the popular ways this is accomplished is:

Firstletter, last name. (jthompson@ci.town.ma.us)
Last name (thompson@ci.town.ma.us)
First name (john@ci.town.ma.us)
Firstname_Lastname. (john_thompson@ci.town.ma.us)