Being the Master of your Domain (Name)

Last updated February 18th, 2025 at 01:37 pm

For some reason, this week’s been a very busy one in the domain name advice department.

Choosing a domain name for your business (or any other enterprise) can be a daunting, stressful, protracted process. It’s a bit like naming a child. You really want to get it right.

Somewhat to my surprise, the guidelines in the article I wrote in December of 2004, “What’s in a (Domain) Name?“, still represent the best advice I can give you. While I hope you go read that article (which is why I have all these links to it), I’ll summarize and elaborate here.

No one right answer.

First of all, there is no one right answer. Instead, there are a number of considerations and factors.

As luck would have it, some of these considerations and factors are competing and contradictory.

• Your domain name should memorable.
• Your domain name should be short.
• Your domain name should include as many major keywords as possible.
• Your domain name should be easy to spell and type (not the same thing).
• It should be legible on a business card and on the side of a truck and on a roadside billboard and on a Web-site banner ad.
• Your domain name should be easy to discern when spoken — on a voicemail greeting, in a radio or TV commercial, in a 30-second elevator speech at a networking meeting, or from a podium or stage after a presentation or performance.

But, Jeff (you ask), how can it be all those things?

It can’t!

Choosing a domain name — or several domain names, because you can have more than one point to the same Web site — is an art-and-science thing.

Example

Here’s a hypothetical…

Suppose John and Sasha are ready to embark on their dream of owning and running a pizza restaurant, and they’ve decided to start out with a portable pizza catering and concession business. They’ve contacted nSiteful and have asked for my advice on a domain name. Here are some domain names they initially considered:

johnandsashawooodfiredpizzallc.com
jandswoodfiredpizza.com
sandjwoodfiredpizza.com

Here’s what I’d tell them.

The first one is too long. Too many opportunities to misspell or mistype. And are those “els” or “ones”? Also, I wouldn’t include an “LLC” or “CORP” or “PC” in a domain name unless using one of those as a suffix is the only way to obtain an otherwise highly desirable (and already-taken) domain name.

The next two are just “okay”.

This is probably a good time to stop and address one common misconception:

Let’s get back to the task of picking a domain name for the portable pizza catering business.

First, I might respectfully suggest that while including the names “John” and “Sasha” (or their initials) might stroke the owners’ egos, I’m not sure it’s the best way to brand the Web site. After all, John and Sasha aren’t quite Ben & Jerry. Yet.

And while the term “woodfired” does, indeed, convey an important element of their catering business, it seems to me that portability might be the element that should be emphasized.

So after searching at GoDaddy.com, I’d suggest they consider the following:

SlicesOnWheels.com
NomadicPizza.com
TravelingPizza.com
TravelingSlices.com
SlicesOnTheMove.com
CateringToPizzaLovers.com

(Gun to head, I’d choose SlicesOnWheels.com), John and Sasha.