Diacritics in domain names

Question

I am trying to think of a good name for a Spanish-based business, but finding a good name (and not reserved domain name) is more difficult than starting a business itself.

Business is going to be targeted at foreigners, mainly Polish speakers, but will be used also by local Spanish people and maybe by English speaking tourists (hopefully). I came up with a name in the form of MyBusiness España and now because of a diacritic I have a problem with a domain name. I do not know which form I should use so it won't be considered a spelling error or simply won't look strange. I have following possibilities:

• mybusinessespana.com - I think this one is the best, as I believe domain names in Spain are mostly formed in this way (dropping a diacritic and leaving a "plain" latin character n), but as I do not speak Spanish, I am simply not sure. Are they? It also has a problem that Polish language already has an equivalent of ñ sound, which is a combination of letters ni so it might pose a problem when Polish person hears ñ, they will be tempted to type ni instead of n.
• mybusinessespania.com - as an attempt to work around the issue of ñ / n / ni sound for Polish people (and maybe others?). I am aware that it might be simply a spelling error from Spanish point of view, but I might keep it as a secondary name, and drop it if it is not used too frequently (i. e. users get domain name correctly most of the time).
• mybusinessespaña.com - it's also technically possible to use a diacritic in a domain name, it's just not that popular yet, and does not work with all software. I wonder if it might get any recognition. Or maybe you simply think it would be better to use ñ instead of n because, I don't know, it's already customary in Spain, or for any other reason?

I am sorry if my questions turns out to be blatantly incorrect in any language-related aspect ;)

Answer 1

Using the "eñe" in the domain name, though technically possible (Internationalized Domain Names), isn't recommended for a non-local audience that may have difficulties typing those characters.

Regarding the transliteration of the "eñe" in a domain is more intuitive for the reader to be just one letter (n), instead of trying to guess the correct phonetic transliteration with more characters (ni, ny or ng).

It happens the same with certain polish characters (Ć, Ł, Ń, Ś, Ź, Ż, etc)

Answer 2

One of the many worries of the Spanish Government is to sell what we call the "Marca España", that is to sell our country as if it were a brand name. For that, we have a web page that can be accessed both as:

http://marcaespana.es

and as

http://marcaespaña.es

So both options can be perfectly valid for your business, just register both mybusinessespana.com and mybusinessespaña.com and make a redirection from one of them to the default site. If you are worried about your Polish clients, just register also mybusinessespania.com. After all, registering a domain is cheap, so why choose when you can have all of them? It is very common for some businesses to register common misspellings of their own brand names to avoid people going into other sites. As we say: más vale prevenir.