Its tough to find a domain name these days that is short and is in Queen’s English.

Its even tougher to find the time to pen my experiences, we all make goals and this one I plan to keep. So I found some time sitting at a Starbucks here looking out at typical Seattle weather. We’re here onsite this week with the biggest software company in Redmond, making sure we continue to exceed their expectations.

I used bustaname.com and makewords.com to come up with synonyms for the word money. I combined them with the word Web to try to find something that would click. The domains that worked were Webdesignoutsourced.com, webpublicize.com, webthrust.com and webtual.com (like web and actual, intellectual, virtual etc).

We did a team session with the names and assigned weight to each name based on several factors such as branding, ease of spelling when you hear it, length, search engine friendliness and relevance to the business. The results indicated a tie between Webtual.com and Websitesinhouston.com.

Websitesinhouston.com was a definite keeper and we chose to use it for this blog. Webtual was subject to more strenous tests. An email was sent out to a sample population asking them to rate, a phone survey was done with others and we went to networking events with the name representing our company. The results came back strong, but the weakest point was the ability to spell it and visualize it when someone heard it. In that respect, it was no better than ChaiONE, Webtual wasn’t a word in the dictionary.

In the next part of this series I will walk you through what happens when we drop the word web competely from our search. Some very cool possiblities pop up. Stay tuned!

In this series of posts, I will walk you through a real world scenario of us coming up with a business name for our company. We see a lot of startup’s that come to us with great business ideas. Some have simple names that are easy to pronounce and find on the net. Others are, shall we say, unique.  

 We realized that our company name, ChaiONE fell in the latter category. When our sales teams were out networking, it took a few “come again”’s to explain what the name was. Those that were learned, failed to comprehend how Chai and Web were related. So we set about thinking, if we were to accelerate our business, should we change our name to one that was all plain English.

The following is a 5 step process I went about to find a suitable name:

1. Look through Google analytics to see what were people typing in to find us.

2. Write those keywords done on a notepad, and brainstorm some others as well

3. Find a keyword that was a must for the company name: In our case we chose the word Web.

4. Then come up with a preliminary wishlist of company names based on word associations with the word Web and the google analytics.

5. Go to a service such as makewords or bustaname to find available domain names. If the names on your list were not available, these sites will help you brainstorm further to come up related available domains.

In the next part of the series, I will talk about what we found and how did we shortlist available names.

Yes we finally put it all together. After months of analysis of data from our previous site, study of visitor behavior, traffic patterns, bounce rates and a host of other variables, we came up with a design. Ofcourse what you see now is a significant improvement over what was our first draft. As we went along, the team came up with better ways to organize and present information.

  Some of our clients and friends asked us why did we need a new site. The answer is simple: To accelerate our business.  Over the next few weeks I am going to walk you through how we went from oldsite to newsite and show you how to accelerate your business.