Top Five Tips for Picking the Perfect Domain Name

I was recently asked for my opinion on choosing a domain name. This case was a personal site, but a lot of the considerations are the same whether the site will be used for personal or commercial purposes. I ended up putting quite a bit of thought into my answer so I decided to share it.

Here are my personal priorities and considerations for picking domains:

1. Shortest .com that I can live with while avoiding dashes or special characters. If you’re lucky enough to find your preferred address ending in .com then stop reading this and register it! Now! Even for churches and organizations I recommend at least parking the .com even if you decide to use the .org version.

2. Will I be communicating the domain verbally? If so it needs to be memorable. Also consider the savvy-ness of the audience you’re communicating to. If your audience is relatively new to the web it’s even more important to stick with the familiar dot-com domain. If you run with a tech savvy crowd, then they are most like ready for anything you throw at them.

3. If people will be finding the site using primarily links online from your other profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) then they’re just going to click on it mainly and the length and memorable factor is less important.

4. Will you print it on business cards? If it’s too long it might not fit well. Also three words are more difficult to remember than two. Keep it as short as possible.

5. If it’s a commercial site that you want to make money with then the decision is much more important than if it’s a personal / business card / blog type thing. If somebody wants to really wants to see your site (they know you or want to get to know you) they will spend the time to figure out what it is. If you’re trying to catch the general population of casual surfers you better make it as easy as possible because you only have a couple of seconds (literally) to hold their attention. Commercial sites need relevant, memorable names. Don’t get cute with it.

I know I promised five tips but here’s a bonus. Try NameBoy.com. You’ll know what it does when you get there so no further explanation is necessary. I’ve never registered a domain without running it by NameBoy.

So those are my top five considerations for choosing a domain name. I’ll give some registrar and hosting recommendations in a later post. Hint: Don’t default to Godaddy. There are other alternatives that don’t use questionable advertising practices.

Brett