I been umming and arring over starting up a small pc repair business as a little earner on the sidelines and if it gets anyway then to replace my current job. I decided just to give it my all and see what happens, anyway... One thing that i can never decide upon is a website name, ideally i suppose it needs to be same as the business name (also undecided) but just how important is a website name? take bit-tech.net for example you get the general idea is about technology but thats about it. How about aria.co.uk or dabs.com, hardly gives you any idea about what the website is about so basically should i worry to much about the websites name and just pick 1 i like the sound of and go from there? I seem to suck at thinking up a name as i can't seem to think of any other then something-pcrepairs.com
It should be as close to the business name as you can get. Less risk that people won't be able to find your website when searching for the company name online. If you want to make your service more obvious then by all means, add "PC Repairs" to the name, but be careful about adding things to your website name which aren't explicitly in your business name.
It doesn't have to be anything to do with the company name, that's your legal entity - your brand can be whatever you want. Currys.co.uk isn't run by Currys Ltd. for example. The real question is where do you think your customers will come from? If you expect them mainly to find you by google it's probably more important than if you have adverts in the press.
For a small business in repairing computers, a general good plan I see most people do is to try pick something in one of the following categories: 1) Location name + Business (e.g. 'location'-tech.co.uk) 2) Some familiar word + business (e.g. wise-computers.co.uk, that domain is actually available... a bit surprising) 3) Something short and easy to remember (e.g. pcquickfix.co.uk); if your company & domain name is easy to remember it'll be the first one that rolls off of a previous client's tongue when they get asked by friends for recommendations. As a rule of thumb with PC Repairs, try to make it a technology themed domain name as to not confuse anyone. You won't impress many potential clients handing out the domain name "turboredux.net" for a PC repair service. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule (Apple, Currys as previously mentioned, Xoxide), you usually need pretty good advertising to help get things in motion though. A bit of advice I'd recommend is if you have more than one word, always try to make sure the later word doesn't start with the last letter of the previous one (computerrepairs), from what I've seen having the same letter ending a word and starting another seems to confuse people... plus it doesn't look too nice. If you must have the same letter like that, split the words with a hyphen.
Thanks for the replys, just all so frustrating as i want to get things moving, have 99% of things planned out, i just can't get past 1 single bleeding name i like the name 'liquid insides', dont ask me why as i haven't a clue but it i can only loosely relate it to pc's so its probably pretty bad. the only other 1 i can think of is jd-pcrepairs, covers the whole telling you what it is but it just sounds so common, like every other fool who decides to do something like this the location name thing would of been pretty good but unfortunately i live in a fairly rural area, inbetween 2 county's so picking a place to cover my potential client's area wouldn't be easy.
Perhaps something around the lines of these to go with your liquid theme: Liquid Computers/PCs Fluid/Liquid PC Repairs PC Flow (this one may sound like a slightly dodgy police officer's name to some people) All of those are currently available as .co.uk/.org.uk domains as well.
i quite like Liquid Computers, cheers unless i have a sudden brain wave and think of something else il go with that.
Whatever you do, do not fall into the Davessuperpcrepairshop.com trap. Long overly complex names are an instant no no. I am a big fan of KISS and thusly would go for PC-Fix.com (crap already taken) or PC-Doc.com (dammit 2 out of 2 taken). Right, Happ- Lappy.com, PC-Mechanic.com, Lightning-PCs.com, TIM'll Fix It.com
General rule of thumb is that if you want google traffic then you need a domain name with your keywords in it eg pc-repair.co.uk or pc-repair-lincolnshire.co.uk or whatever. If you are intending to advertise locally/word of mouth, then your domain name should be your business' name I guess.
You know that thing where your mind sees letters and interprets them into words, well whenever I see pcrepair, my mind ignores the initial 'p' then focuses on "crep" and interprets the 'e' as an 'a'. I don't recommend pcrepair as part of your business name. I like "TIM'll Fix It" though. I'd even change my name to match, if it were me. I see ctrl-alt-delete.com is taken but ctrl-shift-escape.com is available
ah tempting tempting ctrl-shift-escape.com sounds good, not obvious but ties in nicely, thou be bit dodgy using it as a company name, trying to tell people it verbally would be interesting to lol. Advertising will be done word of mouth/newspaper etc mainly so not to fussed about high search rankings just as long as people can find my business name easily enough. the whole ignoring certain letters would explain why i never really liked the looks of -pcrepair.com lol Just had to share this was searching through local companies offering the same service and came across this. Realtime Business Servcies is the company name, not bad apart from the spelling mistake but their website address made me chuckle - www.realtime-bs.com
To add to the Ctrl stuff, how about Ctrl-Save? Has a similar ring to it like the other Ctrl commands and has the word save to go with you saving people's computers.
Yeah but for the purposes of my example, your focus would be to get clicks to your website, not on how memorable the brand is. For example, you want to sell shoes. Your website would be best called "shoes.com" or "shoesshoesshoes.com" perhaps maybe? Someone googles for "shoes" and one of the top hits is going to be "shoes.com" because the keyword you're looking for is in the domain name - this is noddy SEO stuff. If you expect 90% of your sales to be through google - and there are people who expect this and higher - then you NEED your keywords in your domain for the very best ranking. If your aim is to advertise on the local free noticeboard in Tesco, the local free ads paper, and through friends and family, then you wouldn't need to bother going down this route.
