Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Choosing a Domain Name

Almost everything about a website can be changed later. The design, the words, the platform, the host, the developer.

The domain is the exception. Change it and you lose accumulated search history, break every link anyone ever made to you, and have to update printed material, listings, profiles and email. It is doable and it is the one decision worth spending an evening on. Good systems also reduce what people have to keep in their heads; this article explains that idea in more detail.

What actually matters

You can say it out loud and someone can type it. The test is a phone call: say your domain to a stranger and see whether they spell it correctly without you spelling it. Hyphens, unusual spellings and doubled letters all fail this.

It is short enough to write on something. A van, a card, an invoice, an email signature.

It matches what you are called. If your business is one name and your domain is another, you will spend years explaining the discrepancy.

It is not confusable with an existing business, particularly a local one or one in your field. Search the name before you buy. For an independent reference beyond this site, Namecheap is a useful place to compare approaches.

You can hold it forever. A domain is a rental, and the one asset it is worth being fastidious about renewing.

What matters less than people believe

Keywords in the domain. bestportlandplumber.com was a strategy fifteen years ago. It carries little weight now and it makes you sound like a directory rather than a business.

The extension, mostly. .com remains the default people type and guess, so it is worth having if available. Beyond that, country extensions are fine and normal where you operate, and newer extensions are broadly accepted now. What matters is that people can remember and type it.

Being clever. Wordplay that needs explaining is a cost paid every time you say it.

The four expensive mistakes

Hyphens. my-business-name.com is a lifetime of saying "with dashes between the words." People forget the hyphens and land on someone else's site.

A deliberate misspelling. Dropped vowels and swapped letters were a startup convention. Every customer who hears it will type the correct spelling first.

Naming something too specific. portlandwindowcleaning.com is a problem when you add gutters, or move. The narrower the name, the more of your future it forecloses.

Registering it under someone else's account. Not a naming mistake, and the one that causes the most damage. Register it yourself, in your own name, with your own card and email. Add your developer as a user if needed.

Practical steps

Say each candidate out loud to two people and ask them to type it.

Search the name for existing businesses, in your area and in your field. A trademark search is worth the ten minutes if you intend to grow.

Check the social handles exist too, if that matters to you. Easier to choose a name where everything is available than to reconcile later.

Check the history. A previously-used domain may carry a search penalty from whatever the last owner did with it. Look it up in the Internet Archive before buying something with a past.

Buy the obvious variants only if cheap and only the obvious ones. The .com if you took something else, and perhaps one common misspelling. Not thirty defensive registrations.

Turn on auto-renew and diarise it separately, because cards expire and a lapsed domain is the one failure that takes your address away.

Add domain privacy if your registrar offers it, so your home address is not in a public record.

If your ideal name is taken

Common, and not a crisis.

Add a word that describes what you do — swainbuilds, swainstudio. Reads naturally and is often better than the bare name.

Use a different extension, if the alternative is a bad .com.

Do not buy from a squatter reflexively. Prices are frequently absurd and a slightly different name costs fifteen dollars.

Do not add a hyphen to make it fit. The most tempting workaround and the one you will regret longest.

The one to avoid entirely

Do not use a domain provided as part of a platform — a subdomain of a builder or a marketplace — as your permanent address.

It costs nothing and it is not yours. If you leave the platform, or the platform changes, everything pointing at that address stops working, and none of the accumulated recognition transfers. Owning the address is the one thing that makes everything else recoverable.

Buy the domain. It is about fifteen dollars a year and it is the cheapest insurance in this entire subject.

The short version