Golf Tip
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Get a great name for your web site
   
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After France, Spain is Europe's most popular holiday destination, and the apparent dominance of France is to a large extent due to visitors in transit elsewhere. .....
Is there anything to learn about how to name your web site from
www.websitesthatsuck.com?
The name of your web site is fundamental to your success. In the
physical world you can have a difficult to remember name and
overcome it with a great location, convenient parking, low
prices, great quality or some combination of these. A hard to
remember name may even be an advantage in some cases. A name
like TCBY (which doesn't predict the service and is difficult to
remember) doesn't hurt sales because yogurt is an impulse buy
and success depends on foot traffic. But the Internet is
different. It is better if people can remember your name!
What makes a great name? Opinions vary but here are some facts.
A great name is memorable. Perfectly memorable names include
Amazon.com and Yahoo.com. Equally memorable names include
www.pitneybowes.com (the people who make machines to put postage
on letters), www.fedex.com, and www.realty1.com. Amazon and
Yahoo are memorable because they aren't obvious while the others
are memorable because they are obvious.
Some great names are acronyms. www.ibm.com and www.ups.com prove
that acronyms work just fine. But some really terrible names are
acronyms too. Other acronyms are misleading (who do you expect
to be at the end of www.aa.com? Alcoholics Anonymous or American
Airlines?). In my opinion, acronyms are best reserved for people
who have a billion dollars to sink into advertising and
branding. Otherwise, you risk getting lost in the acronym soup.
A great name for a web site is also recognizable from the real
world. In the Internet bazaar I think people still like to do
business with people they have heard of and know. For instance,
who do you think is on the other end of www.margaritaville.com?
And we know who is on the other end of www.whitehouse.gov.
Most great names are intuitively obvious. NFL (National Football
League) www.nfl.com is perfectly obvious. So is MLB (Major
League Baseball) www.mlb.com. www.microsoft.com is perfectly
obvious as is www.accenture.com (Accenture Consulting). Much
less obvious and really stupid are names like www.state.oh.us
and www.tri-c.cc.oh.us (Tri C Community College). These names
are dumb because many people cannot even remember the format of
the URL.
What about .cc, .tv, or .info and similar names? How many .cc or
.tv web sites have you been to? Probably very few. And I think
that is the issue. Customers are conditioned to use .com but not
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.tv or .info. So you probably lose with a non-traditional name.A better golf game is achievable by any golfer. It doesnt
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I would avoid them unless there was something special I could
work into the name - the equivalent of the Amazon or Yahoo
approach to being memorable because they aren't obvious or
expected.
Good names probably aren't cute. www.countonshell.com and
www.iflyswa (South West Airlines) are probably a little to hard
to get into a customer's brain because they are a little too
cute. Remember, most people are only going to hear the name of
your web site briefly, and only once or twice. Wouldn't they be
easier to remember Southwest if they copied Continental
(www.continental.com) or Delta (www.delta.com) and just used
their own name? Names need to be straight forward and simple for
customers to remember them.
Hyphenated names probably aren't as good as non-hyphenated
names. For instance www.federated-fds.com (Federated Department
Stores) would probably be stronger as just federated.com. And
www.shop-4-savings.com is probably a harder to remember than
shop4savings.com. The trend, if there is such a thing, is to use
the whole name as one name.
Some really good names come from the retail sector.
www.sears.com, www.jcpenny.com, www.maycompany.com really do
protect and promote the brand and are perfectly obvious and
intuitively easy to find. If you hear it once on a radio
commercial, see it once on a business card, you will never
forget it.
You can find out what names are available at several locations
including http://webhosting.yahoo.com and
http://www.internic.net/whois.html and of course where ever you
wish to register your web site name.
Comments on this article? Wanna talk about golf? Can you get me
on to Augusta National? Contact me!
Jeff Gilman
jgilman@marketingforidiots.com
www.marketingforidiots.com
About the author:
Mr. Gilman is the President of Galileo Consulting and Marketing
for Idiots. He brings over twenty years of diversified business
experience to his businesses from government, private sector and
international consulting.