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.
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.
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.
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!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadQuite a good summary piece nonetheless.
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.
One might argue that the appropriate audience is HN, given that swombat is active around here and a lot of people recognize his handle.
- 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!
yahoo google facebook ...
Pattern? "dboule o"! :)