Choosing a name was much harder than I anticipated. After creating a word bank of 70 words and thinking of more than 220 names, we’ve finally got it! There’s so many things to think about. Is it easy to say? Easy to remember? Easy to spell? I’m sure it’s not this difficult for people that are more creative than us, but sheesh, I certainly hadn’t expected us to take a year to think about it.
Is the domain name taken? If it’s for sale, does it fit within your budget? Most sites are about $9/year for the site name rights. Some site names have been purchased by someone with the hopes of selling it for hundreds or thousands of dollars. For us, paying anything other than the base price for a hobby project doesn’t make sense. We eliminated at least 50% of the names simply due to unavailability or price.
If you’ve ever tried naming a child or even a pet, you know that you want to think about any negative name associations that may be out there. We checked abbreviations or acronyms. Although we’re not thrilled that WC can stand for Water Closet, we’ll be mindful to not use WC when talking about “Wanderful Chapters”. One of the other names that we thought about was “Playful Discovery”. We thought this was great. We’re light-hearted and playful and the journeys will be filled with discovery. After passing the name by a couple of friends, they told us it sounded like porn. LOL! Oops, that’s not what we’ll be doing. Plus, there were already other references for that name which were learning toys for toddlers. Yeah, that name fits them better than us.
When considering your name, consider the many ways that someone could spell it. If you think it will be misspelled frequently, consider a different name or purchasing domain names with different spellings. When typing “Wanderful Chapters”, “Wonderful Chapters” may be accidently or automatically populated by autocorrect. Therefore, we’ve considered buying that site name and redirecting it to ours. The consequences for someone not finding our site are really low right now - oh no, someone has to ask us again so they can see our pictures. But, for only $9/year, we could avoid having this be an issue by buying an extra domain site and redirecting the traffic to our site.
Now you can consider using your business name in other platforms, such as, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. You can set-up pages on each of these platforms for your business. Before doing that though, you should consider getting a business specific email to filter all of your business communication to the same location. Additionally, multiple people can be given access to this email account.
As we started down this path of connecting to multiple platforms, we quickly realized that we hadn’t considered a logo. Umm, two engineers creating a logo, yikes. This may be a challenge for us. Andy started doing the research for how to create one using Illustrator. The logo will also be a representation that can be a part of promotion and potentially merchandise some day. Again, this may not be our final logo, but creating something that we feel represents us is taking some creativity that we weren’t quite ready for yet.
We knew that thinking of a name was going to use skills that we weren’t familiar with using, therefore we planned lots of time for this activity. We started with a shared spreadsheet with a tab that has our word bank of any words that are associated with what we expect with our website to be. A second tab had the names with columns for name, website name, availability, etc. Whenever an idea came to us, we could type it in the spreadsheet. We’d also had many brainstorming sessions as our date night activity. In case you were wondering, it turns out that wine may help to a certain point and then the ideas start getting worse with excess.
So truth be told, we only think we’ve got it. We can always change it later though, right? Sure, it’d be a bit of a pain, but at some point you have to just move forward and adjust, as needed.