Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
III
Choosing a Good Third-Level or Second-Level Domain Name
What makes a good domain name?
This is not an idle question. A company one of the authors (Smith) worked for paid $3 million for
the website Shopping.com during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. The main asset of
Shopping.com was the domain name it owned. Needless to say, the generically named
Shopping.com never rivaled the quirkily named Amazon.com as an online shopping destination.
Generic names such as Shopping.com or Pets.com rarely became successful businesses, and even
more rarely became as successful as the owners of the name dreamed. Instead, a few other charac-
teristics characterize a successful domain name:
•
Guessable
—If the site represents some real-world entity online, such as a person, a school, or a
company, the web user should be able to guess the domain name from the name of the real-
world entity.
•
Memorable
—The domain name should be easy to remember.
•
Spellable
—The domain name should be easy to spell once you've heard it spoken aloud.
•
Unique
—If not representing a real-world entity, the domain name should be unique, easily dis-
tinguished from similar names.
•
Suggestive
—The name should be suggestive of what the site does.
It might be impossible to meet all of these rules at once. Sites like Flickr achieve their goals by
using a slight misspelling of a suggestive name, meaning that people who hear the name won't
spell it right. WordPress itself is a valuable domain name as it meets all these rules.
For companies, it's critically important to have the guessable domain name for their business name.
If your business is named Jobey and Mobey, you really, really want to have the domain name
jobeyandmobey.com. It might be, though, that some other Jobey and Mobey that you never heard of
got it first. It might even be that some domain name speculator knew of your business, bought the
domain name first, and will now only sell it to you for thousands of dollars.
For the Metaverse blog, the name literally means “beyond the universe.” The word originally
appeared in the 1992 science-fiction novel
Snow Crash
, but has since been used to describe a vari-
ety of virtual environments. It's a great name for a blog about open source code, which can be
thought of as contributing to the creation of virtual worlds. (The blogosphere itself—the collection
of all blogs on the Web, along with all the people who create, comment on, and read them—can be
thought of as a virtual world as well.)
For gvDaily, there's some attempted cleverness going on. The blog is about Google Voice, and its
proper name is Google Voice Daily, but using that as a URL would have seemed clunky. Magazines
about personal computers and the Macintosh were given names like
PC World
and
MacWeek
, not
Personal Computer World
and
Macintosh Week
.
gvDaily.com seemed like a cool and catchy name. It's also short to type. Very few domain names
start with the letters g and v, so someone typing the name for a second or subsequent visit will
often have the rest of the name filled in for them after typing just two letters. If the name was
googlevoicedaily.com, typing the first part of the name would have to compete with the might of
Google itself for uniqueness.
