Choose that killer business name [BT broadband office]

Choose that killer business name

Posted 21 March 2007 at 9:20AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online

When you're starting a business, or preparing to launch a new product, one of the hardest tasks is choosing the right name. As the Businesslink website rightly says, it can be an enjoyable part of the process, but it's increasingly important to get it right. Like it or not, first impressions count - and besides, you don't want to lumber yourself with a name you don't like.

Once you've got a shortlist together, it's time to start the depressing process of checking which of your great ideas have already been had by someone else. The rules for company registration state that you can't have a name which is 'the same as' one already registered - although, of course, there's an element of subjectivity inherent in that.

Companies House, based in Cardiff, handles the registration of companies for England, Scotland and Wales. The same responsibility in Northern Ireland is covered by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. Thankfully, one database covers both operations - but curiously, it isn't a 24/7 service.

If you go to Companies House WebCHeck, you can search through the details of two million registered companies, to see if someone got there first. The service is free, but if you want to see more than the basic company information, you'll have to reach for your wallet.

These days of course, the availability of the right internet address is almost as important. But with nearly 60 million .com domains and 5.7 million .uk domains already registered, it's getting more and more tricky to find a good one. It can be frustrating too, with more than a third of domains not actually pointing to a 'real' website (according to statistics from .com and .net registrar Verisign).

A great tool for checking if your chosen name is still available is ajaxwhois.com. All you have to do is start typing your chosen word into the search box, and it instantly checks if it's available as a dot-com, dot-net and so on.

The standard list of endings is tailored to the US audience, but if you want to add a search for .co.uk names, look in the bottom right corner of the screen for 'My preferred extensions', and press 'edit'. There's also a great feature to save your 'favorites': if you're lucky enough to find an address that's still available, just click on the heart icon to add it on your shortlist. Any names you save will still be there if you leave the site, and come back to it later.

Your final check should be a good old Google search, to see what competition you're facing for any given name. Ideally, you will want your company name to be the number one search result for that word; and there are things you can do to make that more likely (which we'll discuss another time). But naturally, if you're battling against thousands of other sites rating highly for your chosen name, life will be more difficult.

Tags: companies house, company registration, domain names, whois

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Comments

1. At March 21, 2007 7:29 PM, Niamh Kiernan wrote:

On the http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/ there is an interesting piece on how companies are harvesting searches that people do on domain names particularly where someone just types in the name to the space bar.

2. At March 22, 2007 9:18 AM, Simon Dickson wrote:

Fair point Niamh... actually, I've often wondered how far you can trust some of those 'whois' sites which let you search for available domain names. If I search for a name, I'm effectively declaring that I'm interested in buying it. What's to stop the 'whois' site buying it automatically, and then holding me to ransom? Granted, you'd probably end up buying loads of domains and never using them... but it probably wouldn't have to be successful too many times to make it worth your while. (I'm not aware of it ever happening, though.)

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