Which domain-name and TLD to chose?

Best practices?

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

since mycompany.cn is already taken, should I go for:

mycompany-china.cn

mycompany-china.com or

mywidget1mywidget2.cn

And advice?

[bill]

What about the .com.cn version of your company's name? That domain name pattern is actually older (before the 2nd level .cn became available) and might be a viable option.

[pmkpmk]

Oh, I forgot to mention that it is taken as well (by a domain grabber by the looks of it).

[bill]

This may go against the popular grain, but I have my company-name-in-pinyin.com and it does just fine in the SERPs.

[pmkpmk]

My management and our Shanghai-based partner have opted for mycompanyname-china.com

[bill]

Probably not my first choice... ;) But you can still work with it. Just make sure that they set the character encoding properly on every page and you can work on promotion.

You're hosting in CN I assume?

[pmkpmk]

You're hosting in CN I assume?

Weeeeeell..... if it was me who makes all the decisions in this case, I would. Unfortunately, too many parties are involved in the decision process, so it comes all down to the least common denominator. And cost is (unfortunately) a huge issue in the whole scenario.

So it's rather "Let's try it with the least effort and see if it takes off, and after a year or so we can think of extending the whole operation". So the site will be hosted on a German server - the same server which hosts our international and our US-american websiites along with various microsites as well.

It's not the path I would have chosen, but I only had a rather minor vote in the whole issue. I'll try my best to make it fly nevertheless, but I made sure my concerns are noted in case the sh** hits the fan (which I think it will sooner or later). Strangely enough our Shanghai partner has the same line of thought as my boss - but after all HE is the one who has the most to gain (or to loose) in this project.

Character encoding: is still Big-8 the one and only, or is UTF8 finally gaining ground?

[bill]

Character encoding: is still Big-8 the one and only, or is UTF8 finally gaining ground?

For the mainland market you would want to use simplified Chinese, and that is still safest served with charset=gb2312

If you were targeting the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets then charset=big5 is the recommended encoding for traditional Chinese.

I still hear concerns about using Unicode for Chinese. UTF-8 may not be the best in terms of widespread compatibility.

[Leosghost]

hosted in germany it won't do traffic worth squat ..