What's In A Name - Building Your Own Website

What's in a name? How do you choose the name of your new website?

It's quite often easier said than done. You can spend hours thinking if a name only to find it's already registered. But do you want to use the business name as the website name? Is there even a business name?

As I web designer, my customers might be looking for me by my business name, so it made sense to use the business name as the website name - Janric. This wasn't our first choice of name, but the first choice where the domain name was free. We could have registered "JanricWebDesign.co.uk", but we were trying to avoid anything too long.

We've also started other little ventures since then, all still under the same business. So these needed other URLs. Obviously we couldn't go for the business name, so we've since used URLs that describe the offering instead.

And that, I think, is a good starting point for choosing a name. If you are dealing face to face with customers and they might want to later refer to your website, just go for the business name. If you are hoping that they will remember the name when they see it, then choose something easy to remember and type in.

If you are hoping for a site that gets a lot of search engine traffic and people find it rather than type in the name then you can try longer and more complicated names. Is it worth it? Does a name such as CompareMortgageRates.co.uk hold benefits over other names? We'll look at that tomorrow.