discuss Ouch, just saw really HORRIBLE website address!

MapleDots said:

Most government websites are like that and in canada they have canada.ca but by the time you get into a specific service it becomes a massive system generated address. They are getting better at using sub domains and folder redirects though, so slowly things are improving.

All that said I firmly believe when one owns a top level domain there is no need for anything else.

You can go....

anything.domain.com

or

domain.com/anything

The possibilities are endless and except in rare circumstances I would find myself sticking to my own domain.

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Wali Dahot said:

Domain names cant have dots in between, so the actual domain as per your example is north-unqwerty.com. I have noticed majority of govt and also some .edu sites use this format for their separate pages as you mentioned etg.fddd-dsda.north-unqwerty.com instead of using north-unqwerty.com/etg/fddd-dsda.

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1. They probably have a policy that all web content in the organization must be on their main domain.
2. By setting it up as third level domains, they can hand a certain level of control to different groups within the institution since each can be set up to essentially act as a separate website.

Bob Hawkes said:

As mentioned government and educational websites, and some others, use third level (or subfolders). While in certain cases this makes the link seem confusing, I think there are primarily two reasons organizations do this:

1. They probably have a policy that all web content in the organization must be on their main domain.
2. By setting it up as third level domains, they can hand a certain level of control to different groups within the institution since each can be set up to essentially act as a separate website.

It is possible to effectively use third level domains to make clever three part domain phrases for social media and other promotional purposes. These work particularly well in Twitter where simply adding the periods make it hot clickable, and new extensions are particularly suited to 2 and 3 word domain phrases.

In general, third level domains are underused in my opinion. Used correctly they have certain advantages as noted in (2). For example, I recently picked up sciences.website which by itself is a not great name in a not great extension. I got it because I saw that it would allow through subdomains many websites in parallel such as medical.sciences.website, social.sciences.website, etc.

At least in this part of the world, because of (1) it is tough to sell to many educational/government organizations. And I have learned that selling domains to academics is hard - at the right pricing a few will get one for personal use, but not many and usually at low prices.

Bob

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strugar said:

"etg.fddd-dsda.north-unqwerty" is just exaggeration and your post makes no sense.

Actually, it makes sense only in connection to your own comment below the article (if it can be called "article" at all), where you promote your .click domains.

If actual site is, let's say, "join.info-board.north-university", it makes sense, why not, why would not someone click such a link? I'd actually rather click such a link than link at shady ntld like .click.

Sure, "join.info-board.north-university" is difficult to remember, but it is legitimate; and .click is difficult to remember as well - I'm sure one third of the users would hit "school.click.com" instead of "school.click", plus one third of the users who hit Ctrl+Enter on keayboard, making it "school.click.com" again.

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