According to various reliable sources, as of April 2010 .uk (UK’s Internet country code top-level domain – ccTLD) is the fourth most popular top-level domain in the world (right after .com, .de, and .net), and has over 8.6 million registrations. Like many other ccTLDs, in the early days of Internet, it was originally delegated to an individual by Jonathan Postel (an American computer scientist who has made numerous important contributions to the development of the Internet, specially regarding its standards). In time, it passed to Dr Willie Black from the UK Education and Research Networking Association. Domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and forwarded to the UK Naming Committee before being processed by UKERNA. The Naming Committee was at the time organised as a mailing list to which all proposed names were circulated. The members considered those proposals under a ruleset that was insisting that domain names should be very close or identical to a registered business name of the registrant. Any name could be objected to, and if only a small number of objections were received, the name would be refused. Also, there was a restriction that a company can have only a single domain name.
By the middle of the 1990s the growth of the Internet, and the arrival of the World Wide Web was pushing domain name registrations requests up to levels unmanageable by a group of part-time voluntary managers. Oliver Smith (Demon Internet) forced the issue by providing the committee with a variety of automated tools, which formalised and automated the naming process. This allowed a lot more registrations to be processed more reliably and quickly, and inspired different individuals to explore more resourceful approaches to domain name registration.
Different plans were put forward for the possible domain management, and Dr Black stepped up with a daring proposal for a not-for-profit commercial entity to properly deal with the .uk domain. Although commercial interests initially hesitated at this, Nominet UK was formed to be the .uk Network Information Centre, and it continues this role to this day. Nominet UK began registering domain names in August 1996 and today is officially recognised by the UK Government as the manager of the .uk TLD. Registering a domain name directly with Nominet UK is possible, but it is quicker and cheaper to register it via a Nominet tag holder.
Some of the earliest domain name registrations (even before the creation of Nominet UK) include: mod.uk (Ministry of Defence), parliament.uk (UK Parliament), british-library.uk (The British Library), nls.uk (The National Library of Scotland), and nhs.uk (The National Health Service), etc.
Today, the .uk top level domain is separated into a variety of second level domains (SLD). Registering a domain name within the SLD should correspond to the type of the activity of the registrant. For example: .co.uk for commercial enterprises, .org.uk for non-commercial organisations, .me.uk for personal domains, .ltd.uk and .plc.uk for registered company names, .net.uk for Internet Service Providers, .ac.uk for academic societies, .gov.uk for government bodies, etc.
Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominet_UK
3. http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/background/history/

Any business is highly dependent on its brand marketing strategies. To attract customers and to gain their interest, businesses always rely heavily on their marketing strategies.

Unconventionally, today we live in the era of science; where the marketing is no more restricted to just an advert in local newspaper or a notice on the corner shop. Marketing also includes making use of current technologies e.g. media to promote the brand but also making it easy access brand for the customers.

Marketing strategies in 21st century are highly shifted towards online marketing; where consumers are getting more and more interested in using the internet and intranet services. These internet and intranet services provide no boundaries for the consumers to make use of. Some of the examples could include email, browsing, banking, shopping etc.

While we talk about marketing and their importance in the era of internet, domain names have an importance which comes as a core value for any business. Relating your business to a particular domain name / web address is very important as this would be the address which would lead the customers to come to your website to use it for your business or whatever purpose you want it to be used. Weather its just a service provision of simple email service, or its a shopping website where you may sell the stuff online domain name is the key for any business to promote in order to attract the customers.

Making people remember your domain name could be a tricky task. If its harder-to-remember domain name, it would be hard to market it and there would be less chances of people accessing it. If its easy-to-remember domain name people may remember it easily and access it whenever they need the service.

A simple analogy could be making someone remember your telephone number. If a telephone number consists of particular digits or sequence of numbers it would be easy to remember e.g. 123123123. However if you have a telephone number say 395360291 its hard to remember even it consists same number of digits.

Same analogy could be used for the domain names. If a domain name is generic and easy, people would remember it. If its hard people may find it difficult to remember.

It could be illustrated with a simple example. Say, someone is running a business of selling cars and wants to promote his business via website. If he buys a domain name which is not generic say www.stegaoreyen.com, it would be hard to market it as no one would remember it.
However with a domain name of generic in nature, e.g. www.buycars.com people would remember it and it would make the brand marketing much easy and efficient.

Similarly while we talk about obtaining a generic domain name, its not necessary that one go for very common words/phrases to obtain a domain name as someone might have already obtained it. Generic doesn’t necessarily mean common words, but generic also means easy to remember. For an example, the biggest online search giant www.google.com. No one knew what Google is. However it was generic in nature as it was easy to remember, it became one of the biggest search giants on internet.

Thus, for any business or personal use, the domain name has a crucial importance which cannot be neglected. A generic domain name could lead a business to success and when there is a need to buy a web address domain name, its always worth buying a generic domain name so that it may make the brand marketing much easy, and make the people use the generic domain name to get the services being delivered.