Most businesses have websites and those websites have the same URL and Domain name as the business name. But some, like B&Q don’t. Admittedly these are few and far between.

What I wanted to know was whether it was possible to have additional websites for a business without having additional trading names? Eg A company is called Joe Blogs Ltd and has a couple of Trading As names which have their own Domains and websites; Eg. Fresh Goods has Freshgoods.co.uk.

The company also owns some other Domains and wants to increase its “presence” and hopefully sales. Can it create websites for these other Domains but not have to go through the process of registering the additional Trading names? So Freshfruits.co.uk is a site owned by Fresh Goods and it sells and markets only Fruit. All sales, privacy policy, address etc is in the name of Fresh Goods.

I’ve seen a few marketing companies do this but wanted to know whether they had to have the additional trading names or not.

Any ideas?

If I understand the question,

Yes. Anyone can register domain names, trading names are generally irrelevant.

Some domain types have special restrictions, but regular .com / .co.uk ones are a free-for-all. You can’t register deliberately misleading names for existing well-known companies though, generally. Eg, assuming it’s available, I wouldn’t be able to register coca-cola.com. There’s absolutely no reason I can see why I couldn’t register freshfruits.co.uk though.

What I’m trying to get at is whether a company can have several websites with different names and market the goods of the main company. The products being sold are all in the main company name but the sites are just that and not registered trading names of the company.

Yes of course you can. The *real* business name behind it needs to be on the site, as does the company reg. number and head office address but you can have as many website names as you want.

The domain can be any name you like. As long as you’re not masquerading as someone else… Sub-domains might be useful to you. For example, freshgoods.yourcompany.com. These are very easy to set-up, and you’re only controlling the one domain still, making it very straight forward and incurring no extra costs. And because it’s the one domain throughout, leaves customers feeling comfortable with your identity.