Choosing a domain name has become one of the hardest problems for businesses to overcome. In some cases it is easy, for instance if you’re company has been trading as Fortitude Wines Ltd and fortitudewines.com is available then the decision is simple. But what if its not available?
If you’re a UK based company then the next natural choice would be the .co.uk top level domain instead of .com. This is what we chose to do as adire.com was already registered to somone in Norway. You could also attempt to buy the .com version of your domain from the current owner, but this can get expensive as some people may try to hold the domain to ransom.
If you’re in the advantageous (and exciting) position of being a startup company that is still choosing the company name then you will find this process far easier. There are a range of ways for you to find both a company name and the domain name at the same time. A good example of this is a company that needed a domain name to sell digital publications. Meeqi Ltd which owns meeqi.com needed a short, memorable, easy to spell domain name. When they began their search, all of the 4 letter domain names had been snapped up and 5 letter domains were soon becoming an endangered species. They made use of a wide range of tools to help find a short domain such as Domain Soup’s five-letter-random-domain-names which can be used to scour random 5 letter domains for availability. makewords.com is also very good, which generates and searches domain names based on a few adjustable settings.
Other techniques are finding a related word in another language and then seeing if it’s free. A classic example of this is Ubuntu, a freely available operating system. It is named after the South African ethical ideology Ubuntu meaning “humanity towards others”.
Be aware of what you are competing with in search engine rankings for search terms. For instance don’t buy ubuntu-ideas.co.uk and expect to appear above a huge site such as ubuntu.com for the search term “ubuntu”.
Also be aware of what your domain and company name really mean, for instance “adire” in latin means “move forward” but “adiré” in french means “lost”. I prefer to think Adire is moving forward, rather than being lost!
Good luck with your domain name.