Check .lt domain

Is it worth to register a domain with Lithuanian characters?

“Businesses have to understand that internet addressed with specific Lithuanian letters are convenient only for the use in the local market”, – states Tomas Mackus, representative of the Internet Service Centre at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU ITC). He suggest for the business to register both options of the internet address.

The fourth election of the most beautiful Lithuanian website name of the year were organised at the beginning of April. The organisation of this event began in 2014, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the enabling of the internet addresses containing special Lithuanian letter in .lt domain. The idea was provided by the Lithuanian Computer Society. Six domains participated in the election this year. Ilgasūsas.lt was awarded the title of the most beautiful domain name.

Tomas Mackus, Head of the Client Service Office at KTU Internet Service Centre DOMREG

“We joyfully support the idea of such election, we are happy that they are organised the fourth year in a row. KTU Internet Service Centre is .lt registrar, therefore we choose the domains with websites (which names contain Lithuanian letters) established in the past year for the voting and help to make a voting list”, – states T. Mackus, the Head of the Client Service Office at KTU Internet Service Centre.

Some users write the “incorrectly spelled” names out of habit

According to him, while choosing the domain names with Lithuanian letters, the main focus is on the grammatical correctness of the name. Also, it is checked if the website accessed by that address is not redirected to another website with “incorrectly spelled” address.

Information technology specialist states that some users replace the special Lithuanian letters by the Latin equivalents while entering the domain names out of habit, therefore, it is more useful for the business to have both registered options.

“The internet address with Lithuanian letters is convenient only for the use in the local market, the businesses should consider that while registering their websites”, advices T. Mackus.

“National” domain addresses are the most popular in Germany

The amount of the registered .lt domains with Lithuanian letter has decreased recently. According to the data provided by KTU ITD, there are 1 650 such .lt domains in total, which makes only 0.9% of all the registered domains. The situation is similar in other countries: 0.8% of .lt domains in Latvia contain special letters, the internet domains with special characters in Estonia make approximately 1.9% of all .ee domains, and only 0.75% of .fr domains use special symbols in France.

According to T. Mackus, sometimes people establish the domains with Lithuanian letters and understand that their foreign clients and partners find it difficult to enter such an internet address; therefore, they stop using it.

However, not every country tries to avoid the diacritics.

“Domain addresses with diacritics are really popular in Germany – 8.5% of all the registered .de domains contain special characters. Almost 5.5% of the domain names in the Swedish .se domain contain the special characters”, – states T. Mackus.

Published 2017-04-11