On our social network development travels, we are occasionally tasked with helping our clients research and choose a domain name. This is a serious effort, as it will represent not only the website but the over-arching business brand as well. Below are some quick guidelines on how to start this process and our general rules of thumb.

Business & Domain Name Compatibility

When choosing a business name, with very few exceptions, it’s very important to make sure that you are picking a name that can be represented well as a domain as well, ideally a .com. It’s not like putting your name on a business card anymore. Most businesses now require a web presence, and easily locating that URL should be considered. An example would be our own business name, Pearse Street Consulting, Inc. Thankfully Dublin’s Pearse Street was still pretty underdeveloped when I took my first entrepreneurship plunge, so the domain www.pearsestreet.com was available. If it hadn’t been, I would have likely looked elsewhere for name inspiration.

Short and Sweet

The next challenge of course is finding a viable domain that is easy to remember, i.e., short and sweet. For example, www.pearsestreetconsultinginc.com is not what I would consider short and sweet, so you won’t find our website there. Finding catchy domains is easier said than done with dwindling free domains, and you may find better luck purchasing domains from sites like Afternic and BuyDomains, but expect to pay more than a few dollars for them. When recommending names, I try to go with two words or less, words that are not commonly misspelled and combinations that roll of the tongue easily.

Get Even Shorter with Extensions

It’s always a good idea to buy up the common extensions to your domain, including the .net, .org and if you are feeling ambitious, the .us and .biz. It ensures that someone else won’t snatch it up and try to sell it to you when you start making your millions. Another cool trend is to explore tiny URLs as secondary domains, utilizing international extensions. For example, we have pearse.st, which we haven’t done anything ingenious with yet (wait for it!). The .st is the Internet country code top-level domain for São Tomé and Príncipe. Go figure! A few things to consider here is that these domains are typically a little more expensive than regular .coms and .nets per year, they take longer to purchase and activate, and there is always a level of uncertainty with how reliable or stable the country of origin is, which is why it’s good policy to have his as a secondary versus primary domain.

Here are some helpful sites for your domain name search, and I’ll add to these as I come across more:

-Yahoo Small Business: Great site for researching available domain and related suggestions and purchasing domains in bulk at good prices

-Panabee.com: This is a fun site to find unusual names using word combinations

-Afternic.com: My go-to spot to find premium domains

-101domain.com: One of many sites that sell international extensions

Happy hunting!

Photo courtesy of Therese Kay Photography

No matter who you are, it’s hard not to feel a personal transition each time you witness summer fade away and start preparing for the impending cold weather. I remember sitting on my front stoop in Florida in the middle of October and having a “whoa” moment as I realized that it was autumn. My favorite season had become unrecognizable to me, drenched in the persistent heat and humidity of the south.

Experiencing the seasons was something that our family was looking forward to coming home to when we moved back to Massachusetts, and every year I find myself appreciating the opportunity it gives me to note the passing of time, thinking about where the last three months have taken us and contemplating what the next few (or six, in the case of winter) months will bring. With winter staring us down after our Halloween Nor’easter, I’m already finding myself anxious about Christmas plans, New Year’s Resolutions (both business and personal), and strategies to survive the long winter.

How does one prepare for the holiday hubbub, the usual business that needs to be taken care of, and also grow and elevate life beyond the daily grind? This has been my new challenge. Now that I have mastered the highest levels of spirit-crushing productivity, I have resolved to take advantage of some of the results of that productivity–extra free time and a finished basement–and create a space separate from my office and every other place in our house that is overrun with toys and within reach of grabby toddlers. In this space I would really love to get back into some actual hands-on artwork.

Before I became a business owner and a mother, art played a huge role in my life. Watercolor, oils, pastels, collages and sculpture, all relics of my past life. As spread thin as I felt in my college days, I always made time for art in some capacity. Eventually that manifested its way to graphic design, and ever since then I’ve had a monogamous art relationship with Photoshop. Well, I’m sorry, Photoshop, it’s me, not you. I want to see other peop–um, media. Very simply, I need to explore other outlets. I’ve had a slab of wax in my basement for five years and it’s begging for some molding.

Right now my five-year-old has more focused artistic time than I do, and that realization, among others, has pushed me to get back to the basics of who I am (or once was) as a creative person. So on that note, I’m going to get off of my computer and get to it.

Enjoy these last moments of fall, friends!

Not long after my stomach declared war on my two old friends, stress and spicy food, I started to think about how I could potentially alleviate some stressors at work by adding to our team. If you’ve ever grown a small business, you know that you start out typically by yourself, wearing all the hats, and slowing but surely begin to delegate those hats to others who can be trusted with those responsibilities. I’ve managed to make really good progress with this over the past year, so I decided to continue the trend and dive into the interviewing process to fill a new position.

This was the first time that I had interviewed for an entirely new position in a long time. I am used to hiring designers and developers, which I have down to an exact science at this point. Interviewing for a management role forced me to assess different backgrounds and qualities in the candidates, and with each interview I found myself forming the position around that person for the moment, imagining each person’s potential for growth in our small, growing company.

For some reason this whole process, in addition to the other usual annoyances of my week, had my head spinning with indecision. Indecisive is not usually a word I use to describe myself, ever. I usually get an idea, deliberate, consult with trusted peers, deliberate a wee bit more, and then act. That process can take an hour or a few days, but rarely more.

Choosing the right employee isn’t something that should be rushed, however draining the process can be. It is so much more than picking an impressive resume out of a haystack. Education is good, but not always paramount. Personality and confidence are great, in the right quantities. Willingness to be passionate about the job at hand and embrace the start-up mentality, priceless!

As you can imagine, after much deliberation, I did make a decision. At the end of the day, the best advice I can give to any business owner is to trust your gut. Not your desire, or the popular opinion, but that tiny voice that says, Let’s do this, or, This doesn’t feel right. You just need to have faith in that voice, and keep listening to it even when you think you’re moving in the right direction, because the winds can change very quickly. So, here’s three cheers to the tiny voice and the joys of delegation!

One thing that makes our industry very unique is that our clients are also that, very unique. Unlike some service providers, we don’t work with the same type of vendor or business owner or consumer demographic time after time. We work with a broad range of clients, from accredited universities to established businesses to start-ups. I would say that start-ups are our most frequent type of client, but among those, we have doctors, military members, college students and small business owners to name a few. Whether this is a first website endeavor or if the client has plenty of entrepreneurial experience, there are certain qualities that we love to see in the people that we work with! (more…)

As the blur of summer comes to a close, I have been getting ready for the fourth quarter rush. This is typically our busiest time of the year. New business is steady, but we are under pressure to launch most of our in-development projects by the end of the year. As a result I’ve reinserted myself more heavily into our processes, which I periodically do to see how we can optimize what we do and how we do it.

With my summer commitments safely in the past, this seemed like a great time to jump back into the thick of things. Then I got sick for a month. After a few weeks of feeling horrible, I did some WebMD’ing and decided to go to the doctor with my findings. I met with him and his army of medical interns to discuss my symptoms, and following a barrage of tests, my findings were confirmed, mostly. I had started to suspect that I had a stomach ulcer, when in fact it is only inflammation. It is what I refer to as a “baby ulcer” because telling people you have duodenitis sounds scary. (more…)

That was the quote of the day.

I read this among a host of other critical comments on my Facebook feed this morning. Yet another wave of negative reactions to Facebook rolling out new features. It seems like Facebook usually does this in smaller doses, but I have to admit that today I was even a little overwhelmed.

Over the past few days Facebook users have been met with new friend grouping features, profile subscriptions, notifications galore and a new feed layout. There are also rumors circulating that Facebook will be rolling out a new profile layout within the week. After trying to absorb all of this with the news that I would otherwise be looking for within my friend feed, I was feeling not so open to change.

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This week my husband decided to take me on one of his annual hiking trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I will preface this entire story by saying that I am not really a very physical or outdoorsy person. The office is my natural habitat, and while Jonathan did not drag me there kicking and screaming, I was definitely apprehensive about the whole thing.

Within the first hour of the 5,367 feet climb to the top of Mount Madison, I was silently cursing myself, my husband and everything holy as the terrain became increasingly difficult to negotiate. My feet hurt, then my neck, then my thighs, rounding up with my hips feeling like they may simply disconnect from my body. Annoyance turned to exhaustion, then to pure frustration, then to anger. It’s amazing how many phases and emotions are experienced on a journey like this, resulting in my absolute determination to reach the treeline in as short a time as possible.

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It’s been a challenging week at the office. You know what they say about opinions and everyone having one? This is a reality that we cannot escape, but it continues to be a challenge when the occasional client gives our team virtually no say in how a project takes shape. It’s like watching a hurricane gaining on you day by day, when a project takes conceptual wrong turn after wrong turn, and ultimately you know that it cannot succeed as a result.

A project manager brought up an interesting analogy today. It’s like hiring a financial advisor, and then telling him or her exactly what stocks to buy. Isn’t that what Etrade is for? Why on earth would you hire a consulting firm with years of experience in a very specific field, and proceed to dictate every detail of how they should plan, design and develop a project? I don’t know the answer to this, but I can say that when someone says that they trust our creative judgment and actually seek our input as a team, it’s like angels calling down from the heavens, light shines through the clouds, and my heart skips a beat. Yay for teamwork! (more…)

I have recently noticed a new trend in social network development that is facilitating social connections in a simple, but more focused way. Group-centric networks have taken the broad “everything and everyone” concept of Facebook and Twitter and whittled it down to a specific niche and are not only offering, but fully focusing on group creation and membership. I think this speaks to the reality that you can only post general updates into a status update space for so long. At some point, it does get boring and where do we go next? Well, it would make sense to find a way to communicate with other people who share specific interests, with whom more in-depth conversations can be had.

Here are a handful of social networks that are engaging their communities with unique, interactive groups.

www.yourgroups.com

YourGroups is an original social network allowing members to create one or more private groups. The site structure and group privacy ensures that your group experience will give you the privacy that Facebook lacks. Whether its your closest friends, family, work group, sports team or school connections, yourgroups provides a private place to support those day to day communications. Here are some of the features it offers:

• Immediately contacting all or a part of your group via push messaging
• Sending a location and time for the group to meetup via push messaging
• Setting up future events for the group to attend
• Check-in to events once you arrive and see who has checked-in
• Posting a message for your group to see
• Sharing pictures relevant just to the members of the group
• Using your phones GPS to set destinations to meet

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I find it increasingly hard to swallow the notion that Disney Princesses are ruining today’s young girls. Suffice to say, I grew up on Disney and I’m running a company comprised of intelligent and self-assured women and men. Somehow I can’t translate that into an entertaining children’s story… Wendy… Peter Pan? I don’t know.

Contrary to trending beliefs, having childhood princess fantasies did not crush my self-confidence and it did not infect me with the idea that I needed a man to wisk me away into some kind of royal domestic bliss. I remember when a new Disney movie would come out and how all I wanted was to hold that shiny plastic VHS case in my hands so I could watch The Little Mermaid over and over and over again. But believe it or not, my thoughts on female role models and romantic relationships were almost entirely shaped by those I witnessed in real life. I remember from a pretty tender age seeing women who were in my family, or friends of our family, who felt really trapped in their marriages, unable to make independent decisions, unable to speak freely, unable to spend their own money and generally feeling pretty oppressed. Maybe they weren’t the breadwinners of the family, maybe their relationship had just degraded to this sorry state from years of neglect, there were hundreds of factors in play. For some reason, I don’t think that watching Cinderella as a child was one of them. Because I freaking loved Cinderella, and I knew exactly what kind of relationship I didn’t want with whatever man I chose to be in my life.

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