How to Name Your Squarespace Website
This is a guest post by Grant Polachek.
As a new business, your website is your gateway to making an impression on a potential user. You can do this through seamless website design and functionality but what would stand out before a customer gets to it is your website’s name.
In a world of booming digital businesses, finding the name of your choice can be difficult. Moreover, you also need a name that sticks with those using the website. So how do you find just the perfect name?
As a business that has helped over 35,000 clients find names for their business, we have been able to condense the naming process into the following 4 steps:
Step 1. Understand Your Brand
Brand naming begins with a thorough backend process of deeply understanding what type of brand you are trying to create. Your brand is who you are and how you want to be seen.
This means having a clear value proposition or USP - try to explain in the least amount of words as possible what you do and what makes you unique. A simple value proposition sounds like this:
“Apple transforms how humans interact with technology.”
“Zoom brings people together through cloud-based meetings.”
“Squarespace provides website templates for every purpose.”
At this stage, you should also focus on what your brand tone is. This defines the characteristics and attitude of your brand. At Squadhelp, we have divided these into 5 major categories:
1. Pre-eminent or classic - ex. Gucci, Apple, Rolex
2. Pragmatic or solution-focused - ex. Salesforce, Netflix, Squarespace
3. Modern / Intriguing - ex. Tinder, Uber, Amazon
4. Playful - ex. SquattyPotty, Mail Chimp
5. Emotionally powerful - ex. Triumph Motorcycles, The Honest Company
This determines how you want to be seen by your audience and will go on to shape all your branding elements including the name, logo, tagline, colors, and so on. If you can succinctly spell out your value proposition and a tone, you will already be ahead of most new businesses and on the path to building an audience.
2. Brainstorm Name Ideas
This is where the process gets fun and creative. Based broadly on the exercise in step 1, you should try to brainstorm a ton of names - both good and bad. This is your opportunity to be creative, quirky, bold, and experimental in your thinking.
Remember, you are not evaluating the names at this point - only creating a repository of all types of names. You can use Squadhelp’s name ideas page to kickstart your naming process.
Some ways to do this is to think of abstract names (Uber, Tinder), short names (Slack, Hulu), rhyming words (Squatty Potty), and misspelled words (Lyft, Tumblr), among others.
3. Shortlist
Once you have roughly 100 or so names from the brainstorming process, you can begin to shortlist them by matching them more closely against the brief you defined for your brand in step 1. If you decided emotionally powerful as your brand’s tone, you would want to steer away from fun or playful names.
You can also gather feedback from your team members when analyzing the names. Plan to end this step with a shortlist of 5-6 but definitely under 10 names.
4. Validate
This is one of the most crucial steps in the website naming process. As an entrepreneur, you can be biased towards the names you finalize. Getting external feedback and validation will help you see the names from a different perspective.
While validating your names, you should focus on these key elements:
1. Domain Name: As a website, your domain name is fundamental to your monetary and marketing success. It must be easy to remember, a close match to your business name, and most importantly, available.
Most short business name ideas will either be taken or available for a hefty amount of money. As a small business, it’s not possible or advisable to spend your marketing budget on only the name.
You can try alternate spellings, adding prefixes or suffixes such as “the,” industry name, looking for .co, .io extensions and so on.
2. Audience Response: You want to get helpful and actionable feedback from a diverse audience on what they think of your name.
Seek help from family, friends, team members but also complete strangers. Tell them the name(s) and try asking the next day whether they remember it or not. You should also run a linguistics test to ensure the name is easy to spell by most people.
Lastly, remember that the name that most people vote for could be entirely different from the name you had thought of. Keep an open mind and try to understand why most people may be gravitating towards a particular name.
3. Trademark Check: You may not enjoy the legal connotations of choosing a name for your website but this can save you plenty of time and resources in the long run. With the help of a legal advisor, you must check if the name has an existing trademark.
Final words
Once you have gone through the thorough 4-step naming process, you can be assured of landing a name or two that resonate strongly with your brand persona and values, are liked by others, and have a marketable component to them. A website name is as fundamental as the business itself and spending time and effort in this stage can propel your business towards astounding success.
About the Author
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world's leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.
