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The best domain name is the domain that reflects your brand, is memorable, easy to spell and ideally reflects what your business is all about. Of course, when the brand is your name, choosing the domain name is easy: www.lizstrauss.com/, http://www.matthewkeegan.com/, www.lillieammann.com/, www.phil-butler.com/, www.johnraul.com/ and so on.

When the brand is not related to your name, getting the domain to reflect it might be a tricky business.

For example, if you want to call your brand ACME – although you risk to be considered a fictional company or a cartoon character – you should know that there are already a few companies called ACME and that most of them already have domain names that include the word ACME.

The main reason why you don’t want to have a brand name similar to one already existent is that when the clients type into the browser what they consider to be your brand name, they might land on a page belonging to your competitor and this way you’ll be in danger to lose potential sales.

With a bit of imagination and some free online tools, you will be able to find an unique, suitable name that will benefit your online business.

Many companies still choose corporate names that are too long, confusing and irrelevant for their business. We can no longer talk about companies that don’t have online presences – if there are any left you can safely consider them dinosaurs. Any company without a web presence is an endangered species.

Companies that need good memorable domain names often try to register domain names that reflect what the business does and not necessarily the brand. This is not wrong if the site needs to cover a very large industry like cars, electronics, technology, music, film and other general topics.

But www.cars.com, www.electronics.com and all other general terms are already registered domains so what are the real chances for a newcomer to find a general term that was not already booked by some domain veteran? Many of the domain names that consist of general terms are available to purchase, but not many can afford to buy them.

The only feasible alternative is to get a domain name formed by uniting two or more words or by adding prefixes and suffixes. Some of the free online tools listed below might help.

• Dislexicon has an online form that helps you generate new words based on a root word of your choice. For this example I chose the word “writer.” The screenshot below only shows the first 3 of a maximum of 25 generated by the software. As you see, the words are interesting and could make for good domain names. No matter what industry you are in, if you need a good name for your site, this tool might be the answer to your prayers.

  

• Naque has a few nice tools, including a word mixer and a word generator . They are free to use and could help you pick not only a web domain name, but names for your pets, companies and much more.
• DomainsBot is a domain name search engine – not the first, not the last, but certainly easy to use. The results are comprehensible, although they start with domains that are for sale instead of starting with results showing you the available domain names. The tool is still good to identify all existing domain names with a common root. I used “writer” again, and you can see the first results in the screenshot below.
  
• The Fantasy Name Generator is a fun tool created by Samuel Stoddard. The site itself doesn’t have a design we could call “web 2.0” but most of the names generated could be used to book a web 2.0 domain type. The site hasn’t been updated since 2004 if we judge by the copyright notice, but still, it can be useful to find something funny.
• Speaking of Web 2.0 name generators, here is a little tool from a Hungarian developer.

I hope you enjoyed the list. Before starting your online business choose your name carefully. Remember that some words that sound perfectly OK in some languages might have offensive meanings in other languages. Think long-term when you choose the site’s domain and the site’s name. If you need help choosing your domain name, we might have a few ideas to help you. Don’t be shy: drop a comment, or contact us directly.