But even if your club is a pillar of the community or active all over social media, that means little if your members and sponsors struggle to find the hub for your online activity: your website. Your domain name could therefore hardly be more important. It acts as your brand name online, and must be easy to find, with search engines often unreliable, throwing up results from other, similarly named clubs from around the world.

For many clubs, this isn’t the case. Their URLs are largely built on old and tired .com, .co.uk and other generic domain extensions, often with random strings of text and abbreviations which no one can possibly relate to or remember.

British tech company Rocket Domains have recognised this issue and come up with an innovative solution. “Any cricket club in the world can now have a branded cricket club domain name by simply placing two dots in their original club name,” says Rocket Domains CEO Fraz Wahlah, himself an avid cricketer.

[caption id=”attachment_202451″ align=”alignnone” width=”800″] Fraz Wahlah, Rocket Domains CEO[/caption]

“Say your club name is ‘Moseley Ashfield Cricket Club‘. We will enable you to use that club name as your domain name: moseleyashfield.cricket.club. You see how simple, memorable, and logical that is? It perfectly expresses your club’s brand and is unique and highly marketable too.

“With this innovative domain & web system, you can visit any participating cricket clubs’ website, at the speed of light, without having to make online searches to find their correct website address.

“Simply type the desired club’s name, with two dots in it, in your web browser and, voilà, you are on their website reading and sharing their updates, filling a membership form, or making a payment.

“That is the power of the cricket club domain & web platform which can instantly create great online brand for your cricket club with the potential for more exposure, membership and sponsorship opportunities.

“What’s more, you can have memorable email addresses for club officials, benefit from an aesthetically pleasing and easy to update website built on your cricket club domain, collect online payments, promote your club with engaging content, and announce fixtures & results with ease.

“Anyone can now visit a cricket club’s website by simply using the club or geographical area name without having to know its web address. Because with us, your club’s name works as your domain name.”

Rocket Domains’ desire to find a solution was based on research into how fans, sponsors, and members look for cricket clubs online.

This showed that a large number of searches for cricket clubs online were of the following form: text queries comprised of club names or locations followed by ‘cricket club’ with dots instead of spaces, input into the address bar, which often doubles as a search engine. For instance, a fan looking for a cricket club called ‘Carlton Cricket Club’ or a club based in ‘Carlton’ might type the following string into their browsers: carlton.cricket.club

The web browser, however, treats the attempted query as a domain name due to the added ‘dots’ and displayed no search results at all, with no cricket club domain system in existence at the time.

The research also showed that using search engines, rather than typing in the exact URL, was the most common way of finding a club’s website, with substantial numbers failing to find the site they were after. And because there can be multiple search results, some of which turn out to be irrelevant, people were sometimes not able to reach the right club website.

However, Rocket Domains recognise that a bespoke domain name, as well as everything that goes with running an efficient cricket website is not, ordinarily, affordable for most clubs.

Rocket Domains attempts to address these problems by giving cricket clubs their own branded cricket club domain completely free for a whole year, while also providing thousands of dollars worth of support. This includes premium website design, a payments and fixtures system, an email system, optimisation, maintenance, updates, SEO tools and support, all without any charge whatsoever.

Rocket Domains also hosts your club website on its super-fast and secure web hosting infrastructure built on Google Cloud completely free for the first three months with an affordable renewal price thereafter.

“Our platform makes linguistically correct domain names and branding possible for Cricket clubs everywhere,” says Fraz Wahlah. “The domain & web platform will be nothing short of revolutionary for cricket clubs’ use of the web. For the first time since the advent of the internet, people will type URLs in their browsers using the natural terms they use for their web searches i.e., ‘club name’ and ‘cricket club’ allowing more people to find and interact with their clubs online with ease.”

While Rocket Domains is a British company, with their primary goal serving British cricket clubs, Wahlah sees no reason the platform couldn’t go global.

“It is reasonable to expect that this innovation made possible by a British tech company will bring immense benefits for cricket clubs worldwide,” he says. “Bridging the last gap in a brandable online presence for cricket clubs is a milestone achievement which will go a long way. I am pleased it was a UK company who came up with this tech solution conceived and made in England, the birthplace of cricket clubs.”

If your club would like to benefit from the new Cricket Club Domain & Web platform, simply visit Cricket Club Domain Website to sign up there.

More about Rocket Domains

Rocket Domains is the launchpad of choice for entrepreneurs to lift off to online space with success. Rocket Domains is where people name their ideas, host a professional website, engage customers, sell their products and services, and manage their work. To learn more, visit Rocket.Domains