Last night, i spent about 2 hours domain hunting. I’d decided i was going to create a site which dipslayed the location of free wireless hotspots using google maps.
Charity Bypass gave me the idea due to the way in which it works – you’ll see that site live very soon by the way, the site is basically good to go now but i just want to create and build a few small social accounts for it which will help to launch it.
It won’t quite be a case of rinse, wash, repeat with this new wifi site, but i will be able to fast track the development of the site thanks to my work on charitybypass.com.
I struggled to find a domain though for this site. I had shortlisted names like freewifihotelmap.com but then i came to my senses and realized that’s much too long. 4 words? I’m better than that… so back to the drawing board and i told myself i could register more than two words in .com format (i toyed with .me’s and .net’s too).
In the end i came up with wifimapper.com. Short, sweet and kind of explains what the site is about. I realise ‘mapper’ is a weak word, but i have to go with my gut – i’ve sold sites with names like ‘sawurl’, urldwarf’, ‘imagehosti’ etc… so this isn’t at all bad.
It’s just about good enough to be understood by search engines and it’s also just about good enough to be understood by humans. But traffic won’t come from search engines initially – believe it or not people don’t actually search that much for things like ‘wifi hotspots’ or ‘hotels with free wifi’. But it’s a growth area, it’s something that can only become more popular, so i’m happy with the domain – i’m confident it’s the best unregistered domain i could find which best represents what the site is about.
My job will start immediately. I need to create a simple logo, i’ll probably use the same sort of style of theme as my charity bypass one, just re-worked slightly. I then have to start building up content and maps / locations which is the time consuming part.
But this is something that interests me, it’s something that will benefit people and i believe i can do a better job on this than most of the competiton. From a quick search i can see similar sites are ugly, not user friendly and a lot of good, strong domain names are just parked landing pages.
