Ok so I’ve been rather blog absent lately. More on that soon but for now, a little introduction to a service some of you may be interested in.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have about a million websites. Ok, maybe slight exaggeration but I have a lot. Most of them I don’t use anymore or never got around to using in the first place but I hang onto them all the same. Over the years I’ve named a lot of websites and it’s definitely got a lot harder. For one thing, all the decent .coms seem to be taken now. I also think a lot more about branding, SEO and all of that marketing stuff. it’s definitely not easy coming up with a good website name these days.

I’ve been planning a new website for a while now (a while = years). Now that I’m finally starting to get back to some of my personal projects (more on this later too) I’ve been trying to think of a name. I want to create a blog about play-based learning, parenting and fun activities. Yes I could do that here but I want a separate space that’s not so personal to me. This idea has been milling around my head for ages and there are some great blogs that have been inspiring me (An Everyday Story is one of my favourites). The problem was, i just couldn’t think of a name.

Actually that’s not true, I thought of the perfect name but the .com is taken and I didn’t really want to settle for the .net. In a stroke of serendipity I got an email from Biz Name Wiz, inviting me to try their service. I’d never heard of a business naming service before and was a little skeptical but I decided to give it a whirl.

I must admit, I was very impressed with the ideas that they came up with and there are a few great names I’m still trying to make my mind up between. The whole process was super simple – I just filled out a form describing what i wanted with links to some similar sites (it can be a website name or a business name or even a product). I was then emailed with a few questions to clarify and expand on my original ideas. A couple of days later I had a PDF of 30 names, all with .com domains available sitting in my inbox. It was really quite exciting to see what they’d come up with!

I ordered the basic package, which offers 30 suggestions and there were  probably at least 10 that I would have been happy to use.  If you want more ideas, you can also choose a package with more suggestions and revisions and you can also order a logo design as an add-on package.

You’ll have to wait and see which name I choose in the end but trust me there were some good ones in there! The whole experience was actually a lot of fun and I’m thinking of what else I can name now :p Maybe they’ll expand into baby naming in the future – imagine the possibilities!

So if you’re naming a new website or business and you’re stuck coming up with a name, give Biz Name Wiz a try so you can get on with the actual work that comes with launching something new (er guess I still have to do that bit…)