
How to choose a domain name - akkartik
http://swombat.com/2011/4/14/domain-names
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pbhjpbhj
Domain name choosing advice from "swombat.com"?

Quite a good summary piece nonetheless.

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swombat
Hey, 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.

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daniel1980fl
ok, can you help me understand what kind of appropriate audience is for
"swombat" ?

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kajecounterhack
Swombat'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.

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davesmylie
The "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!

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spoiledtechie
I 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.

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gloob
I'm skeptical. I don't really see anything inherently less memorable about
Blackwater, Microsoft, or Coca-Cola than Pepsi, Apple, or Dropbox.

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keiferski
Over two syllables, not under two.

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atacrawl
Remember when eBay launched their would-be "Craigslist killer" and called it
Kijiji? _That_ was a bad domain name.

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eof
Make sure it isn't a US controlled name.

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staunch
granttree 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).

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swombat
We 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.

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kmgroove
Doesn't this confusion alone make it a bad name?

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swombat
It's worth the positive associations of the name, imho. Everyone "gets"
GrantTree and likes it.

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imwilsonxu
Take a look at these good (or successful) domains:

yahoo google facebook ...

Pattern? "dboule o"! :)

