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Web Site - New Business


Krin
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Hi

I need to set up a web site for our new business here in France and I seem to remember reading something about the site address having to be a dot fr address. Am I deluded or does anyone else know anything about this?  Also, I will be looking for someone to design said website.  Anyone interested?

Thanks

Krin[8-)]

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I'm sure there are others more knowledgeable than me, but I think I read somewhere that your business has to be officially registered in France before you can use a .fr URL.  We are registered with the Chambre de Commerce and happily use a .com URL.

If you think you might have to give your website address to French customers over the phone, you might like to think about what you decide to use as a website address.  It's a lot easier, in my experience, to use a French name than an English one (you'd be surprised how many I've seen) if you have to give it out to French customers.  It's easy spelling a French name for English customers!

Bon Courage

Jan

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It's worth pointing out you can have more than one website address with the same content (e.g. .com, .fr, .co.uk) for a nominal fee. Also, the extension you want should probably be decided by what audience you are targetting - for a pure UK audience a .uk address will get you into the UK-only indexes of search engines whereas a .fr will definitely exclude you.

An English language or global target audience is best addressed by a .com domain where you have the chance of getting into country indexes as appropriate.

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Thank you everyone.  I think .com will probably be best as we will be aiming at a fairly wide target audience.

Thanks too to Tay and Buntina, I will have a look at your links.

Krin 

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[quote user="Krin"]

I think .com will probably be best as we will be aiming at a fairly wide target audience.

[/quote]

More importantly - where are you going to host the website? location of hosting should be decided by your target audiences location

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I have just finished registering our business for a .fr domain name and it is relatively streight forward providing your business is formaly registered (and you have a siret number).  However, I have read that in June the gates will open and anyone in france will be able to register for a .fr domain name providing they are french resident (how will they check that?). 

Kind Regards,  Mike L

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I have two .co.uk websites No 1 and No 4 in Google for a good general keyword and they also have a PR5 ranking. It seems that .co.uk does not have the disadvantage for a general Google search as I get a lot of Americans contacting me and the site rates above the .coms.

I agree that where the site is hosted is important but for different reasons. Recently a client had his site down as it is hosted in an area hit by Katrina. This caused his server to be moved and a new IP address to be issued - which conflicts with Tiscali/Alice and the site cannot be seen by many with a Tiscali/Alice ISP account - they get a secure Tiscali password box (I thougth that this sort of  thing was not supposed to happen). Now I have been asked to sort this - Tiscali are not going to change their servers and the huge company in the US do not reply to e-mails and their help desk is only open for phone calls when I am asleep. It will probably take a move of host - which is a conflict of interest for me as I host in the UK as well as elsewhere.

As has been suggested I would get a .com.  A site in more than one language (ie pages in French and English) may also avoid the Google 'sandbox' where new sites are now not being indexed and fully listed for 6 to 9 months. Google say this is to try to clear up many of the bulk generated rubbish Adsense sites that are being churned out by the thousands on a daily basis and which they simply cannot cope with.

 Most of my information comes from heavy reading of the blogs of employees of the major search engines.

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