If you know much about me, you know that I have a part time web service company (providing hosting, domain registration, design, and programming). One common question I am often asked is “what is a good web site name.”
Here is a short list of suggestions. If you want to search to see what domains are available, I recommend searching (but not buying) from www.enomcentral.com. Why not buy from them? I am a reseller for them and actually sell my names a little cheaper. If you are interested, contact me and we’ll talk. I really don’t mean for this blog post to be a sales pitch. What do I mean by “safe?” I’ve “heard” but not ever “confirmed” that some web registration sites “snap up” good names when you search for them and don’t buy them. One report I read of this recently was from none other that Network Solutions, one of the companies that has been the longest in this business!
Here are 4 quick suggestions:
1) Meaningful name – The name should reflect the content that is on the site. You wouldn’t use a name like “dogsforyou.com” if all you sold were cats. Yes, this is the “duh, I already knew that” suggestion, but needed to be made anyway.
2) Short – Shorter is BETTER, in my opinion. Remember, your domain name will be part of your e-mail address, so if it is something like: www.thisisareallylongdomainnamethatiamusing.com then your e-mail will be myname@thisisareallylongdomainnamethatiamusing.com — see what I mean?
3) Easy to spell – My business name is Innovative Bits, LLC. I learned quickly that no one can spell Innovative correctly. Rather sad. Why did I not use ibits.com? It was already taken and was currently being used, so I registered innovativebits.com
4) .com over .net, .biz, etc — Why? As I mentioned, I wanted ibits.com, but it was taken. When .biz was added as an option, I quickly snatched it up. .biz is actually also for businesses (.com stand for “company, .biz, business). The problem then? Not enough people have heard about the .biz and it confuses people when they hear it… “how do you spell that? .b-i-z?” Because of the “.com” boom in the 90’s, everyone thinks of .com first.
A bonus suggestion… it is ok to have multiple names, but I would use one as a primary and have everything else redirect or “mirror” the current site. Example: I still have “www.innovativebits.com” but I use “ibits.biz” on everything.