There are many times that I catch myself dreaming what would happen if 15 years ago I had the enlightment to register some .com domains. Imagine having in your procession domains like home.com, loans.com, realestate.com, business.com and so on. Today these domains are priced to the millions scale. On the other hand it became extremely difficult to find a meaningful and easy to remember domain that will cost you only 8 dollars to register. As you may understand you can’t have every domain you want unless you sell your house!

On the other hand, services and content are the ingredients that gave meaning to domains that are heard as foreign words to our ears. If you hand on your portfolio domains like youtube.com, technorati.com, zillow.com and so on, what would be your benefit? Those 3 domains don’t cost a dime without their services and marketing. But to have a short and easy to listen and remember domain is by any means fundamental.

Fortunately today there are many web 2.0 sites that give you many suggestions on criteria you enter. For instance you decide the number of letters that your new domain should have, the prefix and suffix, the extension and so on. My personal favorite website is Make Words. These services are called Domain generators and you could find many such providers. One of the most old service of this kind is Name Boy, but it is not extended enough because it is not updated in a regularly basis.

Finding a great domain is only the first step. Secondly, you need to develop offline a great website with lots of unique and interesting content, filled with eye catching graphics and finally have to find a trustworthy web hosting company in order to host your creation. Every step is fundamental and a serious webmaster should be very careful. 

Nowadays, to deploy a website seems to be the easiest thing to do. And this feeling is in a large degree true. The difference is, and always was, between the “I have a website” and the “I have a successful website” statements. The term successful refers to the site that is popular among the users and drives earnings to its creator. A web page that is visited only by its developer isn’t even by far successful.

As a last note I should point that we do not ask for domain suggestions on public forums. I have seen many circumstances where a newbie webmaster announces his domain on a forum and asks if it’s cool, before registering it! I don’t have to say what happens next… The domain is registered by someone else who then asks a heavy reward from the original “thinker” in order to transfer it to him!