the Fictionalrealm / Coding

Okay . . .  So this is one of the things i hate the most! And this hated moment of choice arises nearly every time you start doing something new. I really can’t say that i’m good at this but i know some guidelines you should follow when choosing a domain name and some ways to help you to come up with something sane & proper. So lets start with the guidelines.

Guidelines you should follow

• Domain name = Website name Your domain name and the name of your business/website/organization should match. When the user clicks a link and lands on your website they don’t look at the address bar, they look at the title and guess what? they remember the title! So if they want to enter the website they visited yesterday they’ll type in the name of your website and hit enter. It’s in your best interest for the name to match with the domain name.
• .com rule Unless you’re not a non-profit organization(.org), governmental/educational institution(.gov/.edu), an internet related company(.net) or a business targeting UK (use co.uk in this case) go with the .com that’s what people will try first if they don’t remember your exact address. That’s what most of the browsers try appending to the end of address if it wasn’t found. And finally that’s what looks good!
• < 10 characters The shorter your domain is – the better. Usually it’s desirable to have domain names shorter than 10 characters unless the words in it are really memorable. Using more than 2 words is also undesirable in most cases. I know it’s hard to follow this(most of 2 word name are already occupied) but do you best before buying someveryverylongshit.com.
• Google it first before buying. Suppose you’ve decided to name your website kakashka (gibberish names are very popular at the moment cause most of the non gibberish ones are already bought) just googling it will tell you that that’s not really something you want your business to be called(kakashka means shit in Russian). Besides that there’s always a chance that there’s something popular with that name already. If this is the case then climbing the Google result staircase to the first row will get much harder for you.
• No dashes, plural form, “The”, “My” or anything alike. Do you best to avoid the use of any of the mentioned unless it’s used not just because the original name was already bought & there’s a meaning in the use ( like myspace.com ). Generally if you want your website to be named my-domain-name.com you should also buy mydomainname.com and set a redirect on it to point to the one with dashes. The same works for the plurals, “The” & “my”. Also if you use dashes in your domain name it will get wrapped by many text editors which IMO ain’t a good thing.
• Memorable & easy to pronounce. Your domain should be memorable and easy to pronounce so that if someone tells his friend on the phone your address (BTW this is the most effective viral channel) they won’t have to spell the address. For example your domain name almost certainly will have to be spelled if it contains “ph” instead of “f”, “y” instead of “i” or r instead of “er”. This kind of thing get less important once you gain huge popularity but things like these you never know beforehand.
• Trademarks, respect them. Don’t name your website betterthanamazon.com or iphonesotfware.com or anything else containing trademarks. Basically the trademark owner may really quickly take over any domain you have registered with his trademark in it.

Looks like that’s it. Those are all the rules i know of which you should follow when buying a domain name.

How to come up with a good domain name

• First of all i’d like to note that using your browser to check if the domain name is in use is a really-really bad idea Use services like BustAName, CheckFaster or GoDaddy to check for available domains.
• Make up a list of words & short phrases that are relevant to your business/organization. Consider adding some of the “Web 2.0″ words to the list (words like feed, cloud, buzz, blog & others). Try mixing them with one another to get something what’s not in use already. Most likely you won’t be very successful at this. So in case you fail there are a couple of good resources i know of which will help you to mix your words & to come up with some new ones. The first one is Dotomator.com this one is particularly good cause it has a huge list of words & word parts in it  which you can mix the the words you’ve already came up with yourself. The second service you may find very useful is Thesaurus.com which gives you list of synonyms for your words (is very helpful when you run out of words and need some new ones).
• Write down a list of short adjectives (hot, cool, red, new, old . . .) and try combining them with your existing world list and see if something sensible is not occupied already.
• Consider naming your website after some animal, plant or something other completely unrelated to you business but memorable. IMO it’s okay  for a image editing software being hosted on hippo.com BTW this kind of domain name also provides a logo idea.
• Consider inventing your own word for the domain name. It should sound good, be easy to pronounce & do not require itself to be spelled out when one tells his friend about your website. This has a little caveat though: for users it may be harder to remember that selfinvented word than something they understand but I don’t think this is really that big of an issue.
• Do not hurry

In the end i’d like to note that the last time i bought a domain name it took me 2+ weeks to decide what i want it to be. If you know of some other way to help out in this please comment about it and i’ll add it here.