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!

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…)

I can’t believe that I wrote Part I of this series over a year ago. How time flies!

So, what has happened? Well I had a baby, that sort of ate up a few months of my time. Back on track now, we’ve been noodling through some new venture ideas lately, with the hope of acquiring investors to fund them. This has thrown me back into the “To Get VC or Not” journey. As I mentioned in my last post, our structure and approach is a bit unorthodox, coming at ventures with an established team and business, with the hope of building out not just one great idea, but many. It’s not a model that you really see, so instead of wasting my time and anyone else’s time moving in this direction, I made a really good decision. I asked for some advice.

I decided to reach out to some of the connections that I’ve built up over the past six years and ask some pointed questions on what could work and what definitely won’t work when it comes to attracting investors. I had the opportunity to connect with a former client, who also happened to be a serial entrepreneur, tech start-up CEO and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He was gracious enough to answer some of my questions and offer some valued advice. (more…)

For the past few weeks we have been interviewing for entry-level positions in the company. The first quarter has blown our socks off in terms of new projects, so we’re now charged with the task of growing our Pearse Street family ever so carefully! Hiring is a time where, as a business owner, I pull from lessons learned more than ever. Who we are as a individuals, essentially, is who are as a team and as a business. One bad hire can really affect our group dynamic, not to mention throw a wrench in our project schedule if someone doesn’t live up to standards.

In this industry, it is actually pretty tricky to hire someone who is qualified for what we specifically do, so I have a few methods that I employ for hiring everyone from designers to programmers. Here goes.

Love what you do.

This is an absolute requirement. Code for fun? Design in your spare time? Guess what, we do this all day long and strangely enough, what do we do in our spare time? Well, most of us work on fun side projects, from mobile apps, to hobby networks, to design projects for friends and family. To us, this is more than work. Remember those sports shirts that were so 10 years ago reading “Golf is Life”? Well, we need some that read “Code is Life” and “Photoshop is Life.” Seriously, someone get on that. (more…)

I’m the first to admit that when I want something, I don’t like to wait too long to have it. Nothing was more satisfying than embarking on my search for office artwork on Thursday, only to have a collection in hand on Friday afternoon. That, however, was a nearly cosmic sequence of events. Not everything can always come together so quickly. Building a house, starting a business, even having a baby. All things happen in due course.

With websites, it’s not like running to the store and getting immediate satisfaction from a purchase. I’ve had clients liken their website-building experience to being “pregnant” with their concept, with the end goal of “delivering” a beautiful website (they say these things, not me, I swear). As much as I can relate to the seemingly never-ending gestational process, I’d say website construction is more like house-building. I haven’t personally built a house but I was heavily involved in the remodel of half of my house, from gutting to finishing touches, and I know how much planning, design, shopping and patience a project like that takes. While the home improvement shows make it look easy, they’re also squeezing weeks and months into a 30-minute show.

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Some days I think of the role of a project manager is like being a sherpa of sorts. A techie sherpa. There is a mountain to climb… the website. There is an ambitious person at the bottom of it who is determined to climb it… the client. There is a person who has been there already and survived… me. It’s hard though. There may be some bumps and bruises and you can never count on the weather. But we can and will get there! Unless you yell at the sherpa because you’re tired of climbing. Never yell at your techie sherpa. The same way you would never yell at your mother, or your lawyer.

A big part of navigating the way from a concept to a completed project is facilitating between the person with the idea and the many people who make it happen. This requires a bit of translating. Yes, programmers speak a different language, at least when it comes to websites. I can map out a verbal request for a function from a client in a way that one of my programmers can mathetmatically understand. I can explain what we’re doing and how we’re doing it in layman’s terms that a client understands. I can also break down a number of acronyms that may seem overwhelming to someone who is green to web development terminology. PHP, XML, DNS, MySQL, LAMP, IP, FTP. (FYI, we love acronyms so much that every one of our projects gets their own also.) (more…)

Sexy and technology aren’t always two words you hear together. In fact women and technology aren’t two words you hear together that often, unless it’s highlighting the overwhelming lack of the former within the latter. That said, these ten women represent high-powered entrepreneurs, executive, artists and techies who are defying statistics, pioneering the industry and making a name for themselves. From ecommerce to marketing to blogging, spanning from corporate to indie, our top ten have taken the high-tech industry by storm, and quite frankly, they look good doing it!

Cyan Banister, Entrepreneur & Artist

Cyan was born into a family of artists and grew up around paint, photography and music. From these beginnings, she developed a life-long appreciation for the arts that eventually inspired the Zivity platform, an ad-free social network for models, photographers, and video artists. This platform she created is a new way for artists to profitably connect directly with their fans in the rapidly changing digital media landscape.

Cyan has held many leadership roles throughout her career, from leading technical operations teams in an enterprise software company to helping women master technology as CTO of a nonprofit organization. She is also an angel investor and has invested in Facebook, EQAL, Mimoco, OtherInbox, Thumbtack, Tagged, Hot Potato, Powerset, Topsy and others.

Cyan is also an event and portrait photographer and enjoys jugglers and magicians.

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