I'm getting cautious in my old age. I have a small venture that I need to come up with a domain name (and business name for) and suddenly find myself thinking too much about it.

The name needs to be memorable and unique too to reduce search engine competition. Descriptive too, snappy, and of course the business name needs to be easy to fit to available domains.

I'm thinking myself in circles here. How do you narrow down your choices?

If you've no restriction with the tld and open for different option, you may have some good choice. Try out searching domain name through using few suggestion tools like pcnames.com/nameboy.com, I hope it would be helpful to you.

What kind of venture are you looking to start? Picking a name for your business is one of the hardest things to come up with. I would suggest something personal, unique, symbolic, and short. Domain suggestion sites will help you out greatly.

I assume that you need to look through web domain name registrars. Do not concentrate on the TLD only. There are some lovely ccTLD here.

I agree with TopQHost, make it something personal. More so than catchy it needs to be easy to remember. Don't get into the odd spelling unless you have to and again if it is easy to remember.

Try to think out side the box. it took me a good 2 months of thinking of a a great name for my company. Once it pop in my head I knew that it was the right name for my company. Just curious but what do you think of my company name cyberworldhosting?

One of the things to decide when choosing a name for your business is whether you want it to be a personal reflection on you, or if you're looking to mention the type of work you do in the company name.

Desert Real Estate -- pretty straigh forward.
ReMax -- doesn't say what they do, but because of branding we know.

Much of what you name your company will depend on how you market it, if you want to tie something personal to it, and if you are including the company name.

Blue Pinapple --- I can market that as ANYTHING.

I detest the silly spellings, the use of numbers to make things unique and so on. I am aiming to get something unique that is truly unique so that the search engine competition is less.

I have at least six weeks to come up with something so its not a rush yet.

That would be some fun advertising there mate.

I think that the numbers and crazy spellings have gotten to the best of us. I can not think of anything other than script kiddie and/or scammer when I see sites like those and it just makes me think its a waste of space on the net.

Names are hard, it took me forever to figure out what I wanted for my own (personal and also the business) and for the business one it took months going back and forth with my ideas.

I missed that post-it would be interesting to think what you could match up to a name like that!

Shockym, I get the same impressions from things like the numbers and so on. Certainly it does not have any good impressions for me.

So was it disclosed in the thread what the business venture was going to be doing? Were we coming up with names or just a discussion on the names?

Sometimes a number works, but it's rare. I see the number "4" being replaced for "for" all the time, and it's 50/50 results on whether it works or not.

I'm actually going to throw in something on that nameboy.com it is really helpful even though some of the things that it generates gave me a "WTF?!" thought.

What also really helps is if you found a name that you like, but it's taken, try combining words, or if it's a compound word (two words put together to make one word, like 'pinball' thus the word hasa whole new meaning to it. And if part of the word is an adjective (describing word) try replacing it, like instead of 'beta' being in a word, try 'delta' or something like that. The words you can come up with are really neat once you start doing this - that's how I came up with the name I'm going to be using very soon.

If the names are available, try to get keywords you may be targeting for search engine placement into the name. It doesnt have heavy weight with placement, but I believe it does make a difference. Also, I would avoid having dashes in the name; name-name-name.com.

A silly spelling may be bad but if you misspel a word it can be unique or make it sound like the word phonetically. Maybe a word with a DOUBLE L you can reduce to a single L.

Del = Dell for example.
What I would do is get a few clean sheets of plain white paper and start braingstorming. You could create a mind map start in the middle and write one word, maybe an Adjective or something about your business. From here just keep associating and writing what comes to mind. Circle the first word and draw 5 lines out from it in all directions. Write your 5 new words. Circle them and keep repeating. On another piece of paper write 50+ words non stop, FILL the paper up. You need to put your subconcious to work on helping you find that name.

After you can start compounding names together, trying to misspell them, search for available domain names, etc.
Good Luck!

You had six weeks to come up with a name - have you selected one yet? Just curious.