How to choose a domain name | Hacker News Reader

How to choose a domain name

swombat.com

34 pointsakkartik16 comments

Domain name choosing advice from "swombat.com"?

Quite a good summary piece nonetheless.

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.

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

Tech startup founders.

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.

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!

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.

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

Over two syllables, not under two.

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

Make sure it isn't a US controlled name.

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).

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.

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

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

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

yahoo google facebook ...

Pattern? "dboule o"! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com