Navigating the Global Internet

If you have clients or customers in other countries and work on the Internet, here’s a primer to help you decipher the URLs and emails you’ll be receiving.

First of all, extensions. The most common are .com, for commercial sites; .edu or .ac for educational sites; .gov for government sites; and .org for organizational sites.

There are also other extensions people use such as .net and .cc for various reasons, one of them being that their name was taken at the .com level, and another being cost. For example, my name is Susan Dunn. SusanDunn.com belongs to someone who sells spa products, so I had to go to .cc in order to be able to use my own name.

Next, the United States uses no further extension, but every other country does. The extensions of other countries will always include the .xx code in their respective URLs. It’s good to start getting familiar with them. If you’re like me, you’re already receiving emails with .mu or .ag and wondering where they’re from

Some of these make perfect sense. Here are some examples:

Brazil .br
Canada .ca
Italy .it

Some make no sense unless you’re looking under what that country calls itself. Examples would be Great Britain, Ireland and Germany. Here are their extensions:

United Kingdom .uk
Ireland .ie
Germany .de

Then there are the ones that make no sense whatsoever:

Samoa .ws
Cayman Islands .ky
Mauritius .mu
Dominican Republic .do

And then there are the ones for a country you didn’t know existed, at least I didn’t:

Sao Tome and Principe .st
Chad .td
Kiribati .ki

In order to market and succeed you need to know where your business and customers are coming from, so pay attention to extensions.

You may also want to submit your website on search engines covering these countries which are starting to appear.

Here is a website where all the extensions and country codes are listed: http://www.bitmedia.com/info . Click on the link at the extreme bottom left saying "Internet Information."