What's in a (domain) name?

Maybe the first thing you need to think about is what to call your website. Unfortunately most of the obvious names are gone. Every 3 letter combination has probably been registered already, along with most of the 1, 2, 3 4,5 and 6 letter words in the dictionary, so you're either going to have to register your own name (e.g. bobatkins.com) or you're going to have to make something up.

Using your name isn't a bad idea if it's fairly easy to spell. If your name is Zbigniew Brzezinski, you probably don't want to attempt to register the domain zbigniewbrzezinski.com, but if it's John Shaw, johnshaw.com is pretty good.

Making something up means combining two or more short words into a name. Keeping it fairly short is good. While you could attempt to register the domain name "theverybestphotowebsiteontheplanet.com", it probably wouldn't be a great idea. Nobody would want to type that many characters and the chances of making a typo are high. Even with a simple compound name you have to be careful.

Let's take the example of combining "photo" and "pics". This makes "photopics" - or does it? From the way it sounds, it could easily also be "photopix" or "photopicks" or even "fotopics", "fotopix" or "fotopicks". Now remember what I said about obvious names being taken already? Well here's the situation for these names.

photopix.com - taken
fotopix.com - taken
fotopics.com - taken
photopics.com - taken
fotopicks.com - available!
photopicks.com - taken

So as you can see, even domain names which aren't so good are already gone! Of course you can hyphenate the name, but do you think people will know whether or not to use a hyphen, and if they don't know, they probably won't. So you could look at the domain names foto-pix.com, photo-pix.com, foto-pics.com, photo-pics.com, foto-picks.com and photo-picks.com to see if they are available, but you have to ask yourself if you'd really want any of them.

Throwing two unrelated words together is a possibility, such as purplefrog.com, happygoat.com or yellowdonkey.com - but all those domain names have also been taken! Strings like "Mountain Light" would be great, but of course mountainlight.com has already been taken. You could be lucky and be the first person to think of a really great domain name, but the odds are against it.

So be prepared for a long quest for a good domain name. The only good thing about doing it now is that the longer you leave it, the less chance there is of anything you come up with being available!

What about .net, .org, .biz, .into etc.

Do you need a .com? Well, it doesn't hurt. It's the default extension and it's the one that everyone on the web knows. If someone tells you to "checkout the Google website", you'll type in google.com, not google.net or google.org. Some browsers will look for websites if you don't provide an extension - but they look for .com first.

Now .net or .org are OK sometimes. Photo.net does very well , but it's an old and well established site. My advice would be to try to find a .com name, but if you have a really good name and only .net is available, it might be OK. Just take a look at what the .com version leads you to. If it's a site that would directly compete with you, taking the .net version might not be a good idea as you'd probably be sending them some of your traffic.

There are domain name generators and domain name finders all over the web. Many of them allow you to type in keywords and the site will generate all possible combinations of them, then check which ones are available. One such site is snapitnow.com, though there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of others.

Don't forget to also check out lists of recently deleted (expired) domains at sites like DeletedDomains.com. As of today (08/18/04) they were listing 1600 domains that had expired in the last 60 days that contained the string "photo" somewhere in the name!

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