Tuesday, January 20, 2004

I recently needed to come up with a good domain and came up with some tips for choosing a good domain name:
The key is to get something simple.
1) get a .com. No remembers all the other domains.
2) Domain name should be short. Ideally it should be a single word with around six characters. (think ebay, yahoo, amazon)
3) It should be easy to spell and unambiguous. Don't use "the" at the start or hyphens. (imho da-jump-offz.us would be a bad name)
4) Most real words are taken, so consider making up a word (think google, napster, blogger).
blogger is an interesting one because it is presumably a "contraction" for web logger.
This creates a unique brand and it avoids having to possibly buy the domain.

- register typical misspelling, probable typos and other domains (like .net, .org, etc)
For instance google.com owns gooogle.com (notice 3 o's)
-also consider registering domains that people might mistakenly associate with your name.
For instance dripcafe.com also owns drip.com.

You can always break the rules. For instance, I think http://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com is a good name because it is funny and easy to remember even though it's not short.