Names and the Internet

Although not much progress has been made on the website for Heritage Village, I have re-newed the name registration for http://www.inheritage.ca/ , at my expense. Enough people have expressed support for the idea of an interactive website for our retirees and residents that I felt it crucial to reserve the name. Some folks last year were angry at me because they felt I "stole" the name from the Inheritage magazine, the official magazine of the Heritage Village Recreation Club. The goal is to have a website that when built would be an on-line complement to the magazine and be an integral part of our Village life. "Inheritage" was a name that was selected by a Village-wide contest decades ago but never registered or protected.

With millions of websites now active on the Internet, short names have become scarce and some names are now banned. At http://www.mennoniteheritagevillage.com/ or http://www.heritagevillage.ca/ you'll find the pioneer villages in Manitoba and Nova Scotia . http://www.inheritage.org/ is a design studio that focuses on historical preservation organizations. Finding a name that reflects our community and is still available for registration is difficult. "Heritage Villages" exist world-wide, so we need a domain name that indicates our Canadian location. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority in Ottawa, custodian of the *.ca names, no longer allows registration of names containing "village", "town" or other designation that imply a government. When I discovered that http://www.inheritage.ca/ was still available, I knew we had to protect that name.

So how much is an Internet domain name worth? It depends on many factors: brevity, association to a product or place, website traffic (if already in use). There is an active market in names and anyone can offer to buy via http://www.certifiedofferservice.com/ or other sites. As shown in the chart above, for many names, the bidding starts at over $25,000 US, which is why it was important to lock in an available *.ca name for our website. Now if we could all just focus on building a quality site, we'd have something on-line worthy of the name.