Starting my/your Website: Getting and Picking a Name
Picking a name for my website certainly wasn’t easy. The best advice I got was to pick a name from things I liked. And so the name spracks.com was born. It’s a combination of three words I like. First word Sensei meaning Teacher, second word Prime from Optimus Prime in the Transformers TV and movie series, and third word Hack meaning: an act of breaking down a large complicated system into smaller easier to understand and manipulate bits (I just made that meaning up 😉 ).
I combined the first two to form a nickname Sprime, and figured I could say “You’ve just been Sprimed!” whenever someone uses one of my solutions. The third word (Hack) was the link to the service I want to offer on Spracks.
To complete the name picking, you have to choose what domain you want your website to be a part of. The most popular domains are .com, .org, .net, .gov, & .net, which are the original Top Level Domains (TLDs). There are also Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) like .ng, .io, .co, .in, .ca, and a host of others.
Best practice is to pick the .com domain unless your site is start of a big network of sites, then .net would be cool. You can also pick .org if you’re a non-profit organization, but you can’t use .gov or .edu as those kept for government and educational institutions.
The ccTLDs are good for when you’re targeting a specific country with your website or you’re from that country. They are also good if the .com/.net version of the site is not available.
Finally, you’ll search for the name you’ve chosen to see if it’s available and has not being taken. The best place to search is at ICANN’s Whois Lookup. Using other domain name lookups puts your chosen name at risk, as it can be bought and sold back to you at a higher price. ICANN is the body in charge of managing the Internet’s Address System. So where better to search than at the Oga’s house.
Now if after searching you don’t find your preferred name, you can try:
- An anagram of your preferred name
- A different TLD
- Your local dialect or a translation in another dialect of your preferred word
- A word in a/your local dialect which represents what your site is about or the product/service your site offers
Basically, just define what the site does, and pick a word or words which encompass this.
Once you find the right word, it’s time to get it out there.
GETTING IT OUT THERE
Your website name is also called a domain name, and to put your website out there, you need to register your domain name. When I asked on a tech group/community which domain registrar to use, I was told GoDaddy. I had heard they have really wicked support staff, but due to the ever present upsell on their site, I didn’t like them.
Also GoDaddy has a way of parking/buying a domain name you searched for on their site, but didn’t complete the purchase after the search. Which means if you want that domain name, you have to buy it back from them.
I searched further and found Namecheap. Interestingly, Namecheap was also mention on the tech forum I asked.
Apart from being cheaper, their support has been quick and reliable. They also offer cheap private registration and really cheap SSLs.
There is also GigaLayer which I plan on checking out soon, but as at the time of this post, I used Namecheap to get my domain/website name.
After getting a website name, next will be to build your website, host it online, and connect your hosted space to your website name. Now you have a good idea on how to pick a name and where to buy it from.
Sources:
Image credit: By Sage Ross — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 — Image Link
Originally published at spracks.com on February 6, 2016.
