Here’s something I didn’t anticipate when choosing the domain name for my consulting company. It’s survivable, but it may be more significant to you if you’re also going down this path.
I chose to use one of the relatively new domain name extensions to define my web presence, www.techmetrics.consulting. I considered the ‘findability’ of my site and concluded that the vast majority of visits would be through links provided elsewhere, and there’s not a lot of risk of confusion with the predominant domains ending in .com, .net, etc.
The problem I’ve run into is that some, and presumably many, existing websites that require a form to be filled out have data input validation (a good thing) but their rules have not been updated to acknowledge the new domain extensions as valid entries. I registered my domain many months ago, incidentally. I first bumped into this a few weeks ago when ordering business cards from an online print company and I couldn’t complete an order form unless I replaced my business email address with my gmail one. Minorly annoying, but no big deal. More recently, I couldn’t use my business email address to sign up for an industry blogger’s mailing list. Hmm.
The more concerning gap showed up when I was intalling a WordPress plugin to autopublish blog posts to LinkedIn, saving the manual steps I’d otherwise be following. To do so, the plugin uses the LinkedIn API, and guides me to define a LinkedIn application in the LinkedIn Developer area (https://www.linkedin.com/developer/apps). The LinkedIn form rejects my domain name, saying “Please enter a valid URL.”
Apart from the inconvenience of not being able to publish directly from my blog, I believe this will also show up in how each post (page) is presented in the feed. I can understand how Vistaprint and independent bloggers might have this issue for awhile, but LinkedIn? C’mon.
If any of you are familiar with this issue, please chime in!
