What I Wish I Had Known About Naming a Website & Changing A Domain Name

Many people know that when I founded Sparkplugging, I founded it over 2 years ago under the name eMoms at Home. Very early on I realized the name didn’t really represent the site very well. But it wasn’t until the spring of this year that I realized that not only had we outgrown our name, but it was actively holding us back from further growth.

So we embarked on a full blown rebrand of our site.And oh, if I knew then what I know now…

Lesson #1 - Creating a great brand name is no cake walk

If I could convey to you just how difficult it is to create a great name, I think you just might never do it. This part was excruciating.

We had a few choices:

• Name our site with good keywords in the URL, but be left with a name that would be common and get lost in the crowd
• Name our site with a made up word and have to build our brand from scratch
• Name our site with a metaphor that would convey some meaning while remaining original and catchy

It was my preference to find a name for that last bullet point - but trying to come up with a metaphor for web 2.0 resources for entrepreneurs and self-employed business owners that work at home was a challenge to say the least. But ultimately “thanks” to lesson #2, it was really our only choice.

Lesson #2 - Finding a great brand name that has an available domain name is next to impossible

OMFG. Last time I had to buy an important domain name it was in 2006. The domain squatting industry has exploded in that time frame. We had some really great ideas. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Was. Taken. I kid you not. I spent literally about 120 hours on creating domain names and seeing if they were available.

I did find some indispensable tools to help with this process:

• Thesaurus.com - I think I paid their electric bill for the month of March with the amount of page views I generated on that site
• Dot-O-Mator - Give it some sample words, and it will make up cool web 2.0 names for you, like NewNamezio or NewNameify
• MakeWords - Not quite so cool but still extremely handy, plus it comes with built in ‘themes’ like banking, parenting, even communication verbs that will suggest words to combine with your sample word
• WordLab - A forum of people who like to make up names just for fun - and free! The drawback is that their great ideas aren’t always available as domain names. Some of their suggestions for me were JustBegun and BackyardGenius.
• BustAName - Another helpful domain suggestion tool based on your sample words. I used this one quite a bit. (Thanks Hieronymous for the reminder!)
• PickyDomains - Honestly some of my best suggestions came from this paid service. They only charge $50, and only if you pick a domain through them. I can’t recommend them more highly. An added bonus is that they only suggest available domains.
• GoDaddy has a Firefox (script, extension, add on? dunno) that will add an available domain name search to the list of search engines you can use right in the title bar. I used this a LOT - but can’t seem to find a link direct you where to get if for yourself. I got it by going to the GoDaddy site and a pop-up appeared asking me if I wanted to install it.

Lesson #3 - Don’t rush

We had some very close ‘final’ names we were working with. Unboxify. WorkLifeRemix. HomeOfficeGeneration. Bizsational. We even got to the point of having a logo ready to go for WorkLifeRemix. Then I happened upon the LifeRemix blog network, and we had to start all over again.

Thank god I didn’t run with it without sitting on it for a bit. I hadn’t heard of LifeRemix until then, but it would have been a branding disaster. Not only do they cover similar content, but we would have wasted all of our hard work on a new name that wouldn’t have distinguished us from the rest of the blogosphere.

When we came across the name Sparkplugging, we were also considering Sparkplugify and Sparkpluggers. Extensive research turned up the fact that nobody was even coming close to using a name like this. I really wanted to go with Sparkpluggers, but it turned out that Sparkplugger.com was already taken, and I couldn’t risk the inevitable brand confusion it would cause. Thankfully the previous owners of Sparkplugging didn’t need the name and sold it to me for a very fair price.

Lesson #4 - Keep your advisory committee small

When I first started out getting feedback from readers, I found that it was a train-wreck waiting to happen. No matter what one reader said, another completely disagreed. There was NO WAY to please everyone, so I had to pull back and decide what was right for me and my company.

So I turned to my authors for feedback and advice. Now these people are true marketing and branding experts. I couldn’t have asked for a better team to help me with this. But with 16 authors, there were still too many chiefs. So I found a handful of authors that disagreed the most - true opposite ends of the spectrum. And I ran my ideas past them. Not surprisingly, Sparkplugging & Sparkpluggers was the only one that everyone agreed on - and I knew that if I could please myself and this diverse bunch, I had a hit.

Lesson #5 - Hire competent technical help

This wasn’t a lesson so much as it was my rock-solid foundation for success. Steve Johnson from SawtoothID went so above and beyond the call of duty I still feel like I owe him.

Once we got our name selected, we had to do a series of fairly complicated redirects to ensure that every page on the old site was redirected to its exact new home on our new site. For some blogs it was a no-brainer. But my permalink structure was different than that of the rest of the network, which required special treatment that also affected the rest of the redirects. And some pages that used to be on my blog were going to find a new home at the root of the site (About, Contact, etc.), and I had to create a series of one-to-one page redirects that we had to create by hand.

Lesson #6 - Brace for a HUGE loss in search engine traffic

I knew it was coming - and I really thought I prepared myself adequately. But within 6 days of changing our domain name, even though every single page was redirected accurately, we lost 90% of our traffic from the search engines. And although I won’t tell you just how much that was, suffice it to say that I didn’t sleep for a couple of weeks. It was a LOT of lost traffic and revenue especially because our primary revenue model is based on page views.

Lesson #7 - Brace for a HUGE loss in StumbleUpon traffic

I was prepared for the Google loss. I was absolutely unprepared for the StumbleUpon loss, which was our second largest referrer only to Google. To lose our top two referrers in one fell swoop was a big effing deal, and one that we haven’t fully recovered from.

StumbleUpon sends URLs traffic over time, not in one fell swoop like Digg. You could get a post that hits it big with SU, and then 5 months later, that post can experience a resurgence. It turns out that when SU detects that the old URL has been redirected, it doesn’t just continue to send traffic to the new URL. It basically pulls your URL out of their queue permanently. So we had nearly two years of posts that were receiving residual StumbleUpon traffic that is now gone.

Ouch.

Lesson #8 - Don’t make major changes to your site at the same time as you change your URL

When we launched under the new name, we changed our template, changed our navigational structure, changed the names of several of our existing blogs, AND more than doubled the amount of blogs on our network. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have done all of that at the same time.

In hindsight, the biggest thing I would have done differently would be to either wait to add the new blogs after the new domain was more established or have launched the new blogs under the old name and dealt with rebranding a new blog (more likely the latter). The last time I added blogs to our site, they were immediately indexed by Google and benefitted greatly from the trust of our old domain. While the new blogs on our network are still doing fairly well in the search engines, it has taken longer for them to get established and are still behind the milestones we established the first time around.

Lesson #9 - If you find your name doesn’t fit, change it sooner rather than later

Honestly, I knew 5 months in that the name eMoms at Home wasn’t working. At that time I already had too many non-moms reading my blog, and too many people saying they had dismissed my site because they thought it was ‘just for moms’. I do wish that I had just bitten the bullet and changed it back then, though I will say that I didn’t know all that was in store for the future of this site at that time. But rebuilding a brand and traffic on a five month old site is nothing compared to doing so on a 2 year old site with a network of 7 (now 15) blogs.

Lesson #10 - Don’t dwell on your mistakes or regrets

While I’ve pointed out the challenges I have had with our rebrand, I honestly wouldn’t do anything differently, except I would have changed when I did what I did. While we still aren’t back to the levels of traffic we were at before (which is also partly a seasonal thing), I do know in my heart that our old name was a dead-end road. And under our new name, we will ultimately grow larger than we ever would have been able to before. (Plus I love it even more now than I did when we chose it)!

I get stressed about numbers, but that’s the life of an entrepreneur - it just comes with the territory. The experience has created a stronger brand, a stronger company, and I am a stronger person for having gone through it. The reason I put this information out there is so that other people going through a rebrand or a domain change can learn from what our network has been through.

Edit :: Looks like my friends over at UpTake are losing some sleep right now. They delayed their redirect process until after their new brand was a little more established. Hopefully they will be back on the “UpTake” soon. Yeah, I just said that. I went there.