What’s In a Name?

Yes, a second Name post.  Hopefully you have had time to come up with a lot of naming options.  I also hope that you took the time to wait and see if you liked a name and gave yourself a while to consider your name.   After all, you are going to be building a “brand” out of this site so you will want to have something that you want to stick with.  Changing website names can be a real hassle. 

How do I know?  I let my first website’s name expire and made the change to Ha Ha Shirt Shop after about a year.  Turns out I couldn’t register my website name as a username in some websites because those website name checkers parsed my name and derived a not so nice word out of it.  It took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t use that name, but when I did it was an “oh crap” type of moment.  I then had to register a new name, get hosting, set up the site all over again, etc.  Not to mention I had been putting that first name out there for a year and now all of that had gone to waste. 

Another consequence of the poor name was that even the search engines sent traffic to me when people searched for that word.  Why someone would have searched for it, I do not know.  But they did, and they ended up on my site which was probably a shock as it had nothing to do with nor included the word they were looking for. 

Here is an example: 

You are a Trumpet Tutor.  You want to start a website to put up information about your services.  So you register TheBigTooter.com.  You are playing off the horns sound (Toot) and Tooter/Tutor play on words.  Trying to say you can really get that trumpet going.  Anyway lets look at what is “in” that name.  Since it is all one word the search engines can and sometimes will try and take just a part of the name as a search result.  So if someone was looking for fart humor or the loudest fart, they might type into their search big toot.  This could easily bring up your website.  The question is, do you want those types of searches resulting in your name being listed?  If you don’t have a problem with it, you are fine, but more extreme examples do exist.

Write your website name out on a piece of paper and see if there are any words that can be made – not by mixing the letters, but just by using words w/in words.  If you find any that you might not want to be included in searches for, then you might consider another name.

Was this at all helpful?  What types of name are you using / going to use?  Had you already thought about this?

Ben