Use of Numbers For Words In Website Names

In My Humble Opinion
1

I would just like to conduct a brief poll.

I was helping someone set up a website with e107 and it’s pretty close to finish, but the guy still hasn’t got a name for it.

My pet thing is when you decide on a name for a website, (the URL) should be short, spellable and not cofusing.

He has decided that he likes the name such as Moe4Curly.Com (made up for example)

Now I don’t like the use of the number “4” to substitute for the word “four” because some people will spell out the name as “moeforcurly.com” or even “moefourcurly.com” or “moeforecurly.com”

To me that leaves too much margin for error. And at best if you tell people about your site you have to say "My site is Moe4Curly.Com. That is “M-O-E-the number 4-C-U-R-L-E-Y-Dot-Com.”

I’d like to add, I’m just conducting this for my own sake. This person has his own website and I agree 100% he can do whatever he wants or name it whatever he wants."

I was just trying to see if others think like I do or not.

So my question is when you hear websites with words that could be numbers like Four vs 4 or Two vs 2, what is the first spelling that comes into your mind, the letter or the number?

2

Well, it depends. Website misspelling is mattering less and less, with new browsers and such (and god knows, it seems like half the people in the world just type the website they want into the damned search bar anyway.) Doesn’t seem to hurt icanhascheezburger.com, you know?

3

Try a search for a url with a number in it; you’ll see both possibilities appear (sites with a number and sites without).

This is assuming the url you’re searching is popular enough to make the first page.

4

Whenever my customers are having a hard time deciding on a Web site domain name, I just encourage them to buy all the iterations they can think of and point them to the site. It only costs $7.50 per name per year, and then all they have to do is decide which would be the “main domain”.

Then also, if they go to buy MoeForCurly.com and it’s taken, well that settles that :slight_smile:

5

I agree that makes the most sense, but I was just wondering, when you HEAR websites with words like FOUR or TWO do you normally think of, in your mind, the letter or word.

6

I think word rather than number (and “for” not “four”) if it appears “in context” as per the example. I would only think “4” if it was out of place grammatically such as at the end like “moecurly4”. (But confusing if that made ~sense like “ImHappyToo”.)