What do you do, to make sure you have a website name that grabs customer’s attention like they drove past a green field with a purple cow standing there?

And how do you let them know, at the same time, that they’d like to buy what you have to offer them?

1. Brand yourself with meaning.

Give your website’s name a bite-sized idea, a simple phrase that speaks a message. Remember that this is a dance between meaning for you (a multi-billion dollar company I mention later is named after the founder’s hairstyle), and meaning your customer already understands. Consider words or phrases that people already know about, and have rewarding experiences with (such as “wiki”’s meaning of quick, collaborative help.)

Ask yourself these 3 questions:

A. What do I give to others?
B. Who are the people that want what I give?
C. What makes me different from other people who give the same thing?

Your answers to those questions could turn into a Stephen King-sized novel, especially if you are ready to do something you love. Boil those answers down, and reduce them from a feathered chicken to a bouillon cube:  I give A to B in a C way.

If you’re getting stuck when it comes to your own business, practice this a couple times on an existing business and see what you come up with.

What does your favorite restaurant give you, that is different from what other restaurants give other hungry people?

You’ll notice that many established businesses, ones you’ll get a mental picture of right away (notice colors pop up in your head with the names), are based on a person’s name or an arbitrary (yet distinctive) phrase.

While “Best Buy” sends a message on its own, “Kinkos” refers to the 1970 hair of the founder (Orfalea’s Copies would be tougher to remember). “McDonald’s”, which now considers its first store as the first one opened without the help of anyone named McDonald, is based on a fantastical kind of personal recognition. Which brings us to:

2. Your small business brand may simply be YOU

So maybe you don’t have the striped red stockings or fire-engine hair of a Ronald McDonald – but you could have the personal appeal, to your best customers, of an Oprah. Yes, it is absolutely okay to add a .com to your name. Many small businesses that grow huge, start off as solopreneurs. This is not just for the established, for the Tommy Hilfiger’s of the world. If you are creating good experiences for people with your product or service – link that experience directly to YOU. You are your most unique, differentiated brand.

The reality of this hit me when someone I love published a book. For years, she has run a business site, with the name of her business, TreeHouse Coaching. She runs another website, named after her – but this site is a showcase for her paintings, and was separate from her business. As the author of the book, her name was becoming popular, not the name of her business. People were coming to her art site, looking for her book, and scratching their heads…

It became clear that Laura Lavigne is what people remembered; her name is her brand.

There is only one YOU, but you may still need to put up a fight to get on the first page of Google when people search (ezinearticles.com is a perfect way to do this – there are a few other Chris Shelbys out there, but people can find ME easily by my writing).

If you simply

A) give something you’re passionate about or gifted with, to
B) people who know they want it, in a
C) unique way, you’ll satisfy customers.

If you can talk with people about these things, in a way they are ready to HEAR – you’ll satisfy yourself, with paying customers.

The browser’s mission is to request, retrieve, and display documents (another term for web pages) for the visitor. There are currently dozens of browsers and browser versions in use. Alas, each one may have its own quirky (the polite way of saying “maddeningly buggy”) way of rendering a document.

If you are fortunate enough to be coding for a corporate intranet environment, everyone in the organization probably uses the same version of the same browser. In such a case, you can simply code to and test on that specific browser. But if you are building a public-access internet web site, you need to keep in mind that many features are interpreted idiosyncratically by different browsers, or even different versions of the same browser.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has dominated the browser marketplace for years, but other browsers (notably Firefox) have steadily gained market share.