Trademark holders have been able to register them for some months, and we started hosting our first .cymru and .wales domains late last year when the domains www.ylolfa.cymru and www.ylolfa.wales went live for Welsh publishing company Y Lolfa. For the moment they're just pointing to the main www.ylolfa.com website.
Whilst this is obviously a Jolly Good Thing, I'm a bit irritated with the top level domains chosen: ideally we would have been like other countries and had a single 2 or 3 letter code. What was wrong with having .cym? And why have both .cymru and .wales? .cymru would have been fine by itself, but now everyone will need to buy both, just to make sure no-one else buys the other one.
In some cases this will work well - for bi-lingual websites we can direct the .cymru domain to the Welsh home page, and .wales to the English one. Businesses and organisations can have different domains for .cymru and .wales: siopardfarcdai.cymru and daisaardvarkshop.wales. We've done precisely that for a project that will be launched later this month: Voices from the Factory Floor, for Womens Archive Wales. We'll be using www.lleisiaumenywodffatri.cymru and www.factorywomensvoices.wales
So, it's a very good morning in Wales as we become a fully paid up member of the world of the interwebs.
And of course we'll be offering .cymru and .wales domains to all our customers from now on.
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