Word Tools for Naming Your Business, Product, or Website

Picking an identity to brand a business or a product is an important step. In many ways, this is the front line, the first impression observed by a potential customer or client. The name might be seen on a business card or in a search result, or heard by a friend or colleague recommending a product.

Choosing a name can be a pretty painful process. I mean, you might opt to name your website after your pet but most people have at least the following expectations:

• The name should give some idea about the business or product,
• it should be short and really easy to remember, and
• it's gotta sound cool.

There are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to develop brands. However, not everyone can afford those services and a lot of individuals or small groups of friends working on a project pick the name themselves.

Once you come up with a name you're probably wondering whether the .com domain name is available. Usually it isn't. With the myriad of websites out there and all the parked domains it's difficult to find a good domain name that hasn't been taken. That's why Web 2.0 websites often have deliberately-misspelled words or pseudo-words like Flickr or Traineo. The days of registering Amazon.com are over.

Still, the limited options can force you to come up with more interesting names. Travelocity is a name that I like, combining the words travel and velocity to let you know it's about travel and at the same time give the impression that it's quick and easy to use.

To be honest, I've never used their service but the name's definitely memorable.

So about them domain name picking tools.

How do you come up with a name like Travelocity? I suppose it would pop into your head if you've been brainstorming long enough. Still, it strikes me as something that a computer could help out with.

Turns out, domain name-related websites already do a lot of this kind of thing. I looked up "bestdomainever.com" on whois.net and it gave me a bunch of related names, including these:

• bestsiteconstantly.com
• bestnamealways.com
• betterdomainever.com
• betterdomainalways.com
• betterdomainever.com
• betternameever.com
• bettersiteever.com
• excellentsiteever.com

Sure, "excellentsiteever.com" is pretty bad but it's kind of impressive that they've hooked into a thesaurus to make alternate suggestions.

What would be really snazzy is a tool which gives the user more control over the process. I'm envisioning a word-creation tool that allows you to try on different prefixes and suffixes, combine words when their beginnings and endings have similar letters or sounds, and even distort short phrases into new ones like "when in roam."

It doesn't seem like there are tools out there that do this already but on second thought, maybe that's good thing because otherwise all these names would be parked, too!