What is a "domain name"? It is the website address that people will enter into their browser to get to your website. i.e. www. mysite .com (Except without the spaces, of course!) Here's what you need to know:
1. .com is king. Second best is .net. There's no way around this. The original always sticks, especially in WebLand. If you start saying "dot TV" or "dot us" or "dot ws" it will only confuse people. Most people have never heard of these suffixes! They will think that you have no business sense.
2. Pick something easy to spell. Preferably something that is not pleuralized. If you do go pleuralized, make sure that you buy the non-pleural version of the name too. Here is why:
If I told someone that our web site name is "pinkpowersuits.com", that person could easily not hear the S unless I do my impression of a snake. But if I just say "pinkpowersuit.com", virtually NO ONE will insert an S in there at the end, in their mind. You don't hear an S at the end that isn't there.
You can buy more than one name and have all of them directed to your site, if you think that someone will misspell your name. (Click here to learn how to have multiple website domains get directed to your site.)
Don't use hyphens. I learned that the hard way. I bought a domain name with THREE hyphens because the equivalent with no hyphens was taken and I had already spent weeks coming up with that name that just seemed "perfect" at the time! Then I had to walk around saying "N K hyphen designs..." ALTHOUGH, that said, the search engines prefer hyphens because it helps to separate keywords. So if you want, you can have your domain name be a hyphenated version of your name and you would just have other domains without hyphens that you could print on your marketing material that would also take people to the same site. So, visitors might enter " awesomesite.com" into their browser but then the address will magically change to "awesome-site.com" and they probably won't even notice. ;-)
Oh, and try not to use the word "designs". It's just overused, especially in WAHM World. Just my opinion. Trust me, when you've had a website with a certain name, you notice all the websites with similar names.
Then, forget using numbers-- too hard to remember, most of the time. Even if your site is "we're number 1 dot com", you will always have to say, "The number, not the word."
Basically, if your name forces people to guess or make assumptions, it's not the best that you can do. Ya, ya, it's the name of your first pet or your baby. No one cares. They just want to get to your site quickly, see if the fuss is worth it in exactly 2.4 seconds and then get back to whatever they were doing that is so much more important! ;-)
3. Try to have your keywords in your name. For example, if you sell nursing necklaces exclusively, buy the name www.nursingnecklace.com . It will rank higher in the search engines than www.imakegreatstuff.com even if the two sites are identical in every other way.
How do you find out if your name is already taken? My favourite place is www.whois.net .
