opinios

What's In A (Domain) Name?

I've always lamented the choice of domain name for this site.

In hindsight, something that is as difficult to pronounce or remember as "opinios" (in case you've always wondered, it's pronounced oh-pin-ee-os) is not the smartest choice for a domain name. If it comes up in conversation, people ask me to repeat it. And they often type "opinions" or "epinions" when typing my email address for the first time, which then bounces. It's a disaster.

I registered this domain back in the days of when I new nothing about usability or web marketing, and I substituted for this lack of knowledge with an attempt to be cool. Of course, I didn't know how to do that either, so I substituted for that by trying to be abstract-with-some-vague-Latin-reference, and hoping that people would think that that was cool. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And maybe it was, for a short while. I had my time when photography submissions to opinios were too many to sort through, the site traffic was high and the comments were coming in thick and fast. But I couldn't sustain any consistency to the theme or the quality of the content. So now we're back to plain old random opinios. Occasional update. Infrequent techy web commentary. Less frequent political musings. Large gaps between each.

And that's fine. I'm over it. I probably wouldn't change the domain now anyway, as I have been writing to this site for 4 years or so. I may launch something new (there's a hint, stay tuned!)

However I take consolation in knowing that a couple of sites that I follow regularly have adopted a similarly difficult-to-pronounce-or-remember, abstract-with-some-vague-Latin-reference approach, and their sites are quite popular.

I am talking, of course, of the extremely useful DOM Scripting reference sites, Adactio and Incutio.

So there is hope for me. Now I just have to work on that content.

(For those of you thinking of registering a domain name, here are some tips on what to think about when registering a domain name)