Why I’ve gone dot-com

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.