A domain is the URL or website address your customers go to find your store online. That's why choosing the right domain name for you is so important.
What's a domain name?
A web address you'd type into a browser, for example, google.com is known as a domain name. You can think of this as an extension of your brand or company, so be sure to choose a domain name that is simple, memorable and will represent your company well for years to come. The .com in the address is the Top-Level Domain and may be different based on the country you are in, for instance Canada uses .ca.
How can I set up my Brikl domain name?
Your default BRIKL domain uses the format briklshop.com but you can change this by buying a custom domain name from any third-party domain registrar like Godaddy or Namecheap to name a couple. This allows you to create a fully customized domain name, such as mycustomshop.com or even a custom subdomain of an existing domain like shop.domain.com, and route all traffic to Brikl.
How can I route traffic from my custom domain name to Brikl?
Read more here on how to route traffic from your domain to the Brikl platform.
☝️ If you're not familiar with domain configuration, we suggest you contact your domain registrar to change your routing settings. They can make the changes for you and make sure that it does not affect any other records. This will make the process easier and safer.
Primary domain or subdomain?
A primary domain is your main domain name, i.e., the one chosen as your website address. If you only have the one domain name registered, this will be your primary domain. For example, brikl.com is a primary domain address.
A subdomain is a subset of an existing domain and generally appears before the domain. For example, custom.brikl.com is a subdomain of brikl.com. In this example, ‘custom’ is the subdomain, ‘brikl’ is the primary domain and ‘.com’ is the top level domain (TLD). ‘www’ is also considered a subdomain - www.brikl.com but is a legacy one that is generally used to route traffic for people who still like to type www when browsing, but we’ll get to how we’ll use that one later.
Subdomains are the best option if you already have an existing site and domain and want to keep traffic going there. With a subdomain you can split the traffic to a completely different site with a different purpose, but still maintain your brand in the url.
You can use any text as your subdomain, but you want to make sure it’s easy to type and remember. Common subdomain names include "custom", "teamstores", "teamwear", "design" as examples.
For our instructions we’ll be speaking about www as it relates to any specific domain you’ve created specifically to point to BRIKL, but we’ll touch on custom domains as well.