Businesses may rely on domain names to conduct their day to day work, but that does not mean that they really understand what they are using or how important they are.

Of course those of us in industry may feel tempted to either scoff at people’s naivety or feel terribly frustrated with their ignorance, however neither action is particularly productive.

Loic Damilaville, however, has tried to take a more practical and positive approach by publishing a white paper on domain name management. The document was published a few months ago in French and has since been made available in English.

The document covers all aspects of domain name management and starts from the very basics i.e. what is a domain name and why it is important to you, and then moves onto provide some very useful tips that business people may need.

Some of the highlights:

• Keep domain contacts up to date—as Loic rightly points out this causes so many headaches!
• Domain administrators should actually be aware of their responsibilities - in a lot of cases in my experience the person registering the domain has no real interest in it and won’t pay attention to correspondence once the domain is “live”.

The document also goes into details on how people can use domains, which is important, as many people still seem to think that domains are websites!

If you have a few minutes to spare, it’s a good read and if, like me, you’re getting tired of having to explain “basic” domain related concepts then this could save you a lot of time and hassle.

Originally posted on Michele Neylon’s weblog.