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How to choose a domain name
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoDomain name choosing advice from "swombat.com"? Quite a good summary piece nonetheless.
- swombat 16y agoHey, what's wrong with swombat? ;-) Anyway, as I say in the article, the domain must be appropriate to the audience. If you were building a SaaS startup, daringfireball.net would probably be a terrible domain name.
- daniel1980fl 16y agook, can you help me understand what kind of appropriate audience is for "swombat" ?
- swombat 16y agoTech startup founders.
- kajecounterhack 16y agoSwombat's his handle and the site is essentially a blog. It doesn't strike me as odd that his domain is the same as his username. One might argue that the appropriate audience is HN, given that swombat is active around here and a lot of people recognize his handle.
- spoiledtechie 16y agoI find that 2 syllables is also extremely memorable. Just think how many companies don't use two syllables and imagine how memorable they are. There is a reason why many names don't go over just two.
- staunch 16y agogranttree is a pretty bad name IMHO. I doubt non-native english speakers can understand it. Probably wouldn't pass the phone test. Biggest problem is the double T (and you don't own grantree.co.uk to catch that).
- swombat 16y agoWe do own grantree.co.uk, and so long as you enunciate properly (grANT-Tree) people can hear it fine, in our experience. The key is to emphasize the ANT and separate it from the next T. Otherwise people sometimes hear Grunt-ree or something.
- eof 16y agoMake sure it isn't a US controlled name.
- atacrawl 16y agoRemember when eBay launched their would-be "Craigslist killer" and called it Kijiji? That was a bad domain name.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- davesmylie 16y agoThe "rules" for a good domain are not hard - eg, not exhaustive and in no particular order: - pronounceable, - memorable - spellable (by a muppet) - contextual (eg somewhat related to you or your product) The hard part is coming up with a domain name that meets those rules and is not already taken. This gets harder every day. My particular bugbear of late is the (mostly) recent trend towards .co (columbia) names for those that missed out on the .com name they wanted. Just means if you want to catch this traffic you need to register yet another duplicate name for your site!
- imwilsonxu 16y agoTake a look at these good (or successful) domains: yahoo google facebook ... Pattern? "dboule o"! :)