Soon I will kick off the development of my presentation tool and I spent the last week trying to find a domain name. With each project I launch, it becomes harder and harder it seems.
The screenshot below from SketchHatch shows all ideas and associations I collected. As you can see, it was quite a mess.
What made the search for a name so difficult were domain grabbers. All kind of good names, and even most of the weirder ones, were taken already. And most of the names I checked were not used. I wish they passed a law or something to release domain names back to the public, if they do not point to a unique web site after a year or so. 🙂
For days, I was not able to make any progress. In the contrary, the number of possibilities grew every day. I considered a cool name, like slideninja (taken), because everybody wants to be a ninja now. Or I wanted to look smart 😉 and tried several names of famous speakers. All taken! Seriously people, why would you reserve the name of a person who is dead for thousands of years and hardly anybody has ever heard of? I even tried to create my own Web 2.0 name, but either it was taken or sounded awful (mostly both).
What actually helped in the end was writing down the most important requirements.
- The name should be easy to pronounce.
- It should be easy to write, even if you hear it only once.
- The name should give a good idea of what the application does.
After that finding a good name was a matter of hours instead of days. It is a good practice when making decisions. Right now we struggle making a decision about our for summer vacation. Maybe selecting the most important requirements first will help here, too.
Oh, yes, in case you are wondering. The name I settled on was
One response to “Search for a Domain Name”
Hi Mike,
Nice choice. The name you have chosen is quiet catchy. Looking forward eagerly for your presentation tool to be available.
I see that you are more inclined towards making things easier & interesting for the end user.