Website Design - The Difference Between Success and Failure

And this is supposed to be a creative business! If a company shows a complete lack of imagination when it comes to naming itself, people will clearly expect its work to be boring and unoriginal too.

Some design companies use their own name for their business name (eg Scott Web Design). This does not tell potential clients anything relevant about you and your work, although it might give away irrelevant information, such as your ethnic origin, and, if you use your first name, your age, sex, and possibly your socio-economic background. Research shows that we make judgments about others based on their name. What does your name say about you? Could it be putting some people off because they feel that you are irrelevant to them?

Other businesses include their town or county in their name, eg Manchester Web Design, Essex Web Solutions, but, again, these names do not convey any hard information about your work. Moreover, for most web companies, who will deal with their clients by email or phone, location is irrelevant.

As a quick glance at any business forum will tell you, there are thousands of web design companies and wannabe web designers. This makes it very hard to stand out from the crowd. A good, unique name will help get you noticed. Professional branding companies charge high fees to find such a name, but you can do it yourself for next to nothing.

Sources of ideas

Finding a good name for your business is a time-consuming process, so you will need to set aside a good few hours. Go to an online thesaurus or borrow or buy a Roget's Thesaurus and look up as many design-related words you can think of, such as blueprint, illustration, arty, style, create and original. You should have a few dozen words to start you off. Follow up the links and cross-references in the book or on the site.

Check out the names of rival website designers -- you are not going to copy them, but you need to identify ones you like and ask yourself why you like them, and notice which words are over-used in names (Solutions, Digital and Online, for starters). You will definitely need to avoid these words otherwise you will look as if you have no original or interesting ideas. Read magazines and websites related to other types of design as these will be another source of potential words and phrases. Make a note of words that appeal to you.

You might be intending to focus on creating websites for a particular industry or target market, the music world, say, or alternative therapists. If so, reading publications and websites popular with workers or enthusiasts in this sector will lead you to yet more words and phrases that might make a good, specialized business name.

Points to bear in mind

By now you will have a long list of words and phrases, probably well over a hundred. Many of them will be unsuitable, so your first task must be to go through the list and eliminate the words that are not usable. Don't call yourself Pink Goddess Designs if you want to attract male clients, or name your business ZettaByte or Analog Algorithms if your clients are likely to be ordinary, non-technical people.