Two and a half years ago, I launched my new website. At this time I deliberately shunned “riklewis.com” and instead decided to go with “rik.onl”, essentially because I liked how short it was.
So why the u-turn?
Largely it comes down to professionalism. There’s nothing wrong with having a catchy short URL and many very professional people do. But if someone see’s “rik.onl” in a Google search result, are they really going to have confidence that it’s me?
Ironically I was planning to use https://seb.ly as my example website, as I’ve heard Seb talk at a conference before and he was great, and I loved his domain name. However, this now redirects to the fuller https://seblee.me and it’s only the favicon that remains.
So here I am, in a new home, at https://www.riklewis.com. I’ll try not to change again for at least another 2.5 years.