Choosing the right domain for your business

You're up a ladder, halfway through a job, and the customer asks where they can see more of your work. You say your website out loud. That sentence — spoken once, to someone who isn't writing it down — is the only real test a domain name ever faces.

Most domain advice skips straight past that. A domain is an address. Addresses get said aloud, half-remembered, and mistyped. Everything else you want from a name — cleverness, personality, a pun about pipes — is worth less than a stranger getting it right on the first try.

The only test that matters

Say your candidate out loud, exactly as you'd give it to a customer over the phone. If you have to spell any part of it, it's too complicated. That one rule quietly rules out most of what people talk themselves into:

• Hyphens. One is survivable. Two means every phone call now includes a spelling lesson.
• Ambiguous spellings. Anything where the listener has to guess: kwik, lite, xpress. You'll be correcting people for a decade.
• Accidental words. Read it as one lowercase string before you buy. Squashing words together produces surprises, and you want to find them now rather than after the truck is lettered.
• Anything that needs backstory. If the name only makes sense after you explain it, that explanation won't be on the sign.

Which ending to pick

.com is the default for a good reason: it's what people type when they aren't thinking, which is most of the time. If it's free with your name on it, take it and stop deliberating.

Country extensions — .us, .ca, .co.uk, .com.au — are a fine second choice, and they carry one signal .com doesn't: they tell someone at a glance roughly where you are. If everything you do is within a half-hour drive, that's a free point in your favor.

The newer endings — .shop, .studio, .cafe, .plumbing, the whole catalog — work perfectly well technically. The problem is human. Plenty of your customers have never seen one, and people mistype what they don't recognize. Pick reyes.plumbing and a share of your visitors will still end up at reyesplumbing.com. These earn their keep when the ending is genuinely part of the name and everything before it is short. As a default, they cost you more than they give.

When your name is already taken

Common surnames went early. If Reyes Plumbing finds reyes.com gone, these are the routes that actually work, roughly in the order I'd try them.

Add your city. reyes-austin.com. Nobody will call it inspired. It does describe you exactly, which is the entire job. It nudges the people searching nearby too, though don't pick a name hoping it will do the ranking for you — that work happens elsewhere — if local customers are the whole business, read how to get found on Google in your own town before you spend another evening on the name.

Add your trade. reyesplumbing.com instead of reyes.com. Tells someone what you do before they've clicked anything.

Add your first name. danielreyes.com. For anyone working under their own name this is often the best answer on the table. Photographers, therapists and consultants get searched for by name anyway, and a personal domain outlives every change of service you'll ever make.

What I'd avoid is a near-miss of a name somebody else already owns — bolting on a number, jumping to a different extension, changing one letter. For years, people will call you having read the other company's website and expect you to know what they mean. A clearly different name beats a confusable one.

Things that bite you later

Own it yourself. If someone else builds your site, make sure the domain is registered in your name, with your email on the account. Otherwise your website is something you rent from a working relationship, and working relationships end.

Turn on auto-renew. A common way small businesses lose a website is a renewal notice going to an email address nobody checks any more. Set it to renew automatically, and once a year check that the card on file hasn't expired.

Give trademarks a wide berth. If your name lands close to an established brand, that can turn into a problem — whether it actually does depends on details like the industry the brand is protected in, and that isn't something you'll settle yourself on a Tuesday night. If it feels close, have a lawyer look at it before the truck gets lettered.

Email on your own domain is a separate purchase. Owning the domain gives you the name and the right to point mail at a provider of your choosing; the mailbox itself is its own product almost everywhere, at its own cost. Buy it anyway. An estimate from hello@reyesplumbing.com reads differently from the same estimate sent from a personal Gmail.

Assume it's permanent. The domain ends up on vehicles, invoices, shirts and signs. Pick something you'll still be comfortable with in five years, not something welded to a service you might drop.

What to do this week

Write down three candidates. Read each one aloud to another person — not to yourself, to someone who has to type what they hear. Cross out whatever they got wrong. Check availability at any registrar, register the best survivor, and switch on auto-renew while you're in the account. Waiting doesn't make the good names cheaper. It makes them gone.

Then move on to the part that actually decides whether anyone calls: what a small business website actually needs. The name on the door matters far less than what's behind it.