So, we grew up. The time came to start thinking beyond a single site’s structure that was only aimed at one market audience. (Locals in Australia).
We really do love our .design domain name (porkbun is currently giving away free .design domains the their first year of domain registration, after that it’s about AUD $55 year to run, pretty cheap depending on how you value your money and how many other domains you’re safeguarding from domain trolls/squatters, e.g. Your .com, .com.au and other domain combinations). It’s what makes us partly unique. If you search Google for the term “Web Designer Sydney” (or anywhere really) you will see nearly every site have either a .com or .com.au. (or their respective ccTLD in whatever country). Most of these sites were tacky looking in design too. It made me lose a lot of faith in .com and .com.au based sites. Hence we sought after a fresh TLD to stand out in search engine result pages (SERPs) on Google and Bing etc.
We recently made an assumption that perhaps a .com.au would add greater trust to our website, but with no way to quickly test this apart from running some A/B tests in Cloudflare or Google Optimize (We had a look and didn’t like what we saw), there’s really no way yet to test what we want. Coupled with how Google doesn’t really like duplicate content scattered across multiple domains, makes this an even more difficult situation to be in.
