In an online world where everything.com seems to have already been registered, people are turning to alternative domains more and more often. If you cannot get the .com, then you may be able to get the .co.uk or the .net and this raises some potential issues for people with regard to branding and visibility of their website.
If you are in also involved with children and schools then you need to be especially careful about who you are seen to be playing with. This week shows up a very bad mistake for the National Schools Film Week who’s mission statement says “Our core purpose is to enrich the education of young people across the UK by providing schools with unique film and cinema based learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that are directly relevant to the curriculum, placing film at the heart of their cultural experience.” They have picked up the domain name www.nsfw.org unfortunately many people on the Internet will already be aware of the much more common meaning of that 4 letter acronym Not Suitable For Work. NSFW is usually seen on posts where content or images included are not suitable for viewing at work normally due to nudity or pornographic content and indeed the more commonly visited version of the domain would be the .com which in this case does feature pornographic content.
National Schools Film Week now run the risk of enriching the education of young people in a completely different manner to that expected if any of them visit the nsfw.com domain instead of the nsfw.org one.
The lesson to be learnt is to carefully check other people using the same or very similar domain names to make sure you do not inadvertently end up sending completely the wrong message to your visitors through a common typo or a mistake in the top level domain.
