Build Week, Day 1: How to Pick a Domain Name You Won’t Regret
Boston Made, Inc.Office of the Founder & CEO
From the desk of Nathan StricklandBoston, Massachusetts ·
Dear Sir or Madam,
BUILD WEEK · Day 1 of 5
Your domain is the one part of your website you’ll say out loud a thousand times. Choose it with that in mind.
The radio test
Say the domain to a friend once, out loud, with no spelling. Can they type it correctly? If you have to add “with a hyphen” or “spelled with a Z,” try again.
Rules of thumb
- Short beats clever. Two or three words at most.
- Prefer .com for a local business if you can get it. People type it by default.
- Avoid hyphens and numbers. They’re hard to say and easy to get wrong.
- Add your town if the name is taken (yourbakerymb.com, yourplumberboston.com). It even helps local search (Day 3).
- Check trademarks and social handles before you buy. Matching handles make you easier to find.
- Register it in your own name or your business’s name, with an email address you control, and turn on auto-renew. Losing a domain to an expired card happens more often than you’d think.
Today’s task
Write down five candidates, run the radio test on each, and register the winner. Then start a site on the Fenway Web builder with the Foundation template. Tomorrow you’ll write the homepage.
BUILD WEEK is a five-day guide from Fenway Web, a Boston Made company, to building a small-business website yourself. Next: Day 2, write a homepage that sells.
🛠️ Build it on the Fenway Web website builder · More tutorials at info.fenwayweb.com · All storylines on the Boston Made Reader.
