Anymore, it’s not enough to name your business and hope a good domain name, or web address, is out there somewhere.  You almost need to be sure you can get a good domain name before you settle (in concrete) on what to call your business.

Since so much of your corporate identity can be shaped by the web, potential visitors, potential students, potential members, and potential customers should be able to easily understand and remember your web address.

Several years ago, my church website was at www.cornerstone-sda.org.  There were several problems with this web address.

1. When telling people on the phone, you’d say, “dash” and they’d be, like, “underscore?”  And you’d say, “no.  Dash.”  And they’d say, “slash?”  And you’d say, “cornerstone [dash] sda [dot] org.”  And they’d be all like, “Ohhhh!  A hyphen?”  “Sure, a hyphen.  Whatever.”
2. When telling people on the phone, you’d say, “cornerstone [dash] sda.”  They had no idea what an “esdeeay” is.  “Oh, they’re letters?  S? or F?  S, as in Sam?”
3. It was too long to remember.  What, with the dash and all.  And the meaningless letters after the dash.

So when we redid the website, we called it wichitacornerstone.org.  People got that.  I didn’t have to explain a dash.  I didn’t have to explain an “S”.  Wichitacornerstone.org just made sense.  (BTW, it was a pain to get all of our great search engine results to finally go to the new page.  We should have just got the right domain name the first time.  Oh, well.  Live and learn.)

Ideally, your web address should be short, memorable, and make sense in print and over the phone.

So spend a lot of your initial time trying to find a great web address! (you can use the domain name lookup tool at bluehost.com, for example)  It will be worth all the time you put into it to get it right.