I have found the simple task of naming a site over the years to be… well anything but simple. In fact, it often turns out to be the most frustrating, heartbreaking part of the process of building a site.
Feel like this trying to find a name for your site? Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Just when you think you have the ‘perfect name’, the lawyers come in and tell you it’s so perfect someone else has a copyright for it. Even if they are not actively using it, better to come up with something else rather than end up with a cease and desist order on your doorstep – and then try to explain it to your audience why a one-month old blog is changing its name. Sigh. That’s the voice of experience.
There is so much seemingly conflicting advice around names – make it short, punchy, memorable, clear and descriptive for SEO, make it generic enough so no one can claim a copyright (like chair, table, stapler). That’s when you look at the lawyers and say, “We’ll call it ‘Gazzazzle-rooney dotcom!’
It’s with that context I found it interesting recently that former WashingtonPost.com exec Jim Brady emerged with white smoke pumping through the Allbritton Communications offices with the name “TBD” for his new local site covering Washignton, D.C.
Then earlier this week, this post from Boston.com’s Jason Tuohey:
(TBD is) a curious name for a local news site. Most obviously, it doesn’t contain the name of the region it purports to cover. This is exceedingly rare — virtually all local news sites sport a name that combines the region with some short, peppy, non-descriptive word like “Go” or “Now” or “Live.” (As in “BostonNow” or “Michigan Live”.)
Those titles smack of unoriginality and bleed together like team names at a high school basketball tournament. But the goal, traditionally, isn’t to be original when naming a local news site, it’s to somehow include the name of the region. Since townname.com is never available, you grab the next closest thing.
(Full disclosure: I helped found a website called “GoSkokie” in graduate school for Skokie, Ill., so I’m as culpable as anyone for lame town-specific names.)
If you take a longer look at history, you’ll find this naming convention closely follows how newspapers were titled for decades. It was always “Post” or “Times” or “Herald” or something similarly uninteresting. But really, it was always just an innocuous word attached to a city’s name. The city has always been the brand, until now.
So what does that mean for your site? Probably Global Health wouldn’t have Seattle in the name, but what about the rest? Maybe there is a place in the title, maybe in the tagline. In any case, once again, I want to encourage you to come up with several names you can live with. That way you’ll be prepared no matter what decision the lawyers arrive at after the copyright search.
And try to close in on that name soon. It always takes longer than you think.