What’s in a (domain) name?

Recently one of my oldest friends came to me and told me he was starting over from scratch – now in his mid 30s he was setting out in a brand new career as a entrepreneur in the healing arts — and he needed my help. A very successful designer for over a decade, years of bad posture and unforgiving office furniture that never fit his frame (he’s 6’7″) sent his body into a tailspin and forced him to resign from his day job. He could no longer work the punishingly long hours necessitated by his job. He had tried yoga, swimming, physical therapists and various other treatments, but nothing solved his chronic pain.

Then while visiting his family in Europe last year he discovered a therapeutic modality called Redcord that radically changed his body. For the first time in years, he was out of the chronic pain that had forced him to quit his lucrative day job. So moved by his transformation and motivated to help others, he immediately started training to become one of the first certified teachers in the States.

This series of blog posts will chronicle how we created his new site in only a few short days. We’ll be tweaking and refining the site over the next few weeks as we discuss best practices.

First things first — he need a domain name. A domain name is the address where people find you — like minimadesigns.com.

In Justin’s case his preferred domain name (rebalanced.com) wasn’t available. It’s often the case with common and shorter words that you won’t be able to get the exact domain name you want (or someone wants to sell it to you for thousands of dollars).

Instead of fretting, we simply chose to get a related domain name – rebalancedsf.com. Since for now he’s a locally based business, it made sense to simply add SF (short for San Francisco) to the end of his domain name. We also redirected his old site (hisname.com) to his new business site.

Quick Tip: Can’t get your preferred domain name? Use your locale or profession as part of your domain name (bonus: this helps your SEO!) Example: yournamelocaleyoga.com