Choosing the Best URL
Choosing the best URL for your business website is not always easy, especially when everything good has been taken already. But choosing a URL for a personal website shouldn’t be as difficult, provided that you plan on choosing your given name as the URL and that your name isn’t incredibly common.
Within a week of finding out the sex of our first unborn child and deciding on her name, I headed straight to GoDaddy.com and snagged www.zoecachero.com which was unsurprisingly available. In a world where our online identity is becoming increasingly important, I figured I’d do my daughter a favor and grab her name as a URL, just in case this technology is still relevant by the time she’d have a use for it. After all, her daddy has his name as a website – www.johncachero.com – and I’m glad I grabbed it when I did because there appears to be more than a handful of other John Cacheros in the world (I know this because my ego sometimes forces me to Google my own name every now and again). Anyway, when my mind wanders while doing mundane tasks, I often fantasize that Zoe will one day become famous and will require having a website of her own for professional reasons.
A few months later, I had a conversation with a fellow professional photographer friend that had me second guessing my decision. Kellie – www.kellieraephoto.com – decided not to use her first and last names + “photography” for her company’s name and URL; she used her first and middle names instead. After a minute of surprise and exasperation, I asked her, “Dude, why didn’t you use your last name? Your last name is awesome!” She replied, “Well, if I ever get married, I won’t have to change the business name.”
*LIGHT BULB*
Kellie brought to my attention a solution to a problem that could potentially affect any woman who would like to use her name integrated into her company’s name. Despite Kellie continuing the conversation, my mind wandered off, fantasizing about “Zoe Claire Photography” and “Zoe Claire Modeling” and “Zoe Claire – Evil Genius And Philanthropist”. I immediately headed back to the aforementioned domain registrar and attempted to snag www.zoeclaire.com for my unborn daughter… but was DENIED. That URL was already taken! So, I did what the celebrities who discover Twitter late in the game do when they find out that someone had already grabbed their name as a Twitter account:
I registered www.TheZoeClaire.com instead.
This past weekend, I hooked up some hosting, installed WordPress, and went live with the site. Until Zoe’s old enough to find her own use for the website, I’m going to use it primarily to post photos and videos of her so that our friends and family members who don’t have Facebook accounts can keep up with our girl. Besides, once Facebook’s not too subtle plan for world domination through personal information aggregation is exposed and the site is shut down, we’ll still have a record of Zoe’s pictures and videos somewhere else on the Internet.
So, check it out. The first post is already up and more updates are on the way!
John, I can tell you that I’ve gone through the same issue. You would not believe how many Princess Joneses there are in the world (or people who decided that Laurie “Princess” Jones should be their Facebook name.) There’s even a Princess Jones movie about some peasant who gets kidnapped because she looks like some rich chick. (That’s all I can tell you about it though because it is a silent black and white movie. I can’t sit through that.)
But I will tell you this about being a woman who uses her name in her business: most of us leave our maiden name as our professional name and do whatever we want with our name for our personal life. So hold on to both domains and let her choose for herself when she’s old enough to care.
Duly noted, Princess. Thanks for the advice and for constructively adding to the conversation.
Man, I am really smart.
But hey, I’m glad you actually pay attention to our conversations!
Note to self: in case some other web-savvy coupling takes my future baby’s URL, I will register all prospective children’s websites early (good thing I didn’t do this at age 11, otherwise my rather adolescent choice of MoonbeanJasmine.com would be taken, and then what would the patchouli dealers do?).
Good blog, John.
–>I registered my son for a gmail account when he was 12 months old. It’s his first two initials and our last name.
~deb
http://www.websavvymom.com
This is really cool John. I like the fact that you are starting up a web site for your daughter. Not only can you share pictures and videos with family but it can be a time capsule for your daughter when she gets older.
Being a dad must be cool? Hopefully, I’ll have that experience one day!
John! Glad to be back! Your child is absolutely adorable!