Business Name
JimClark
Registered Users Posts: 305 Major grins
Ok I want to start a business and will soon upgrade my account so i can sell prints. I am really stuck on the name as I really wanted my name in it but my name happens to be a very common name.
any guidence or words of wisdom?
Jim Clark
any guidence or words of wisdom?
Jim Clark
"Christianity, if false, is of no importance,
and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately
important." C. S. Lewis
http://www.photosbyjimclark.com/
and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately
important." C. S. Lewis
http://www.photosbyjimclark.com/
0
Comments
Then you have to decide how important it is to get the .Com version. For example, JimClark.com is taken, but JimClark.biz is not (as of right now). Personally other than .EDU, .NET, .GOV and .ORG (for specific groups) plus country codes, I think all the others are pretty much revenue enhancers for registrars and not really for identity. To me if you can't get .COM try something else. Others may disagree.
Even with an uncommon name like mine I found the obvious taken. You have to hunt, add middle names, or just find something totally unrelated.
Las Cruces Photographer / Las Cruces Wedding Photographer
Other site
I am going to rework and upgrade my account to actually start to sell images and want to have a custom domain. Was wondering if I should just buy one domain or is it a good idea to buy other similar ones. Like jimclarkphoto.com jimclarkphoto.bz
Also do you usually get email with it or just use a gmail account
Do most use the godaddy that smugmug recommends or do you go elsewhere was looking at Hover. Just don't like Godaddy much as a company
and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately
important." C. S. Lewis
http://www.photosbyjimclark.com/
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
I've never completely agreed with this concept even if I understand the reasoning behind it. Upon registering my first domain name I took this advice and am not disagreeing with it now. Here though is a little story as to what happened to me and why even now my domain name emails get forwarded to one of my free email accounts.
My domain was set up back before webmail was the way to have emails delivered. The server side of email just passed the emails onto the local system and all was good with control of how/when/where/etc. of sending/receiving. When webmail came about, the paid email system kept getting tweaked, changed, reconfigured and modified. Emails were getting returned on a random basis, not getting sent at all and sometimes would bail in the middle of writing an email. Yet, by this time, the free webmail systems were stable and had most of the glitches worked out of them by shear amount of use. I set up my business emails to forward directly to my free email and continue to have it do so to this day. To me and my customers it was more unprofessional with a paid email system that wouldn't work correctly vs one that was stable and working nicely even though it was free and had a "bad" reputation.
At this point in my business, I'm not taking the time out to fix and change what isn't broken just cause it looks a "little tacky".
Another varied opinion...
This is actually a good reason to get and use a custom domain email address. When you own the address you have complete control over where it's hosted. In this example, if you weren't happy with your email host, there are hundreds of other companies that you could switch to. GoDadddy offers email hosting. I use Rackspace to host my business email. You find a host you like that offers services that you like and easily switch.
With a gmail or yahoo type account you're stuck with whatever hosting Google or Yahoo provides.
Hotmail used to be popular - now a lot companies block any email sent from a Hotmail account. Will this ever happen to free services like gmail or yahoo?
Yeah...it was one of those paid hosting companies that gave me the problems...but I'm not going to say exactly which as they still provide paid email hosting and I don't want to denigrate the company for past troubles that might no longer exist.
Sure it might happen to gmail/yahoo and it might happen to the other two you listed above as well. It can happen to any company and has happened to certain companies. UN-thanks to spam, blocking has grown way beyond blocking just Hotmail addresses. For the average upstart business it is much easier to switch a one time forward unlike having to completely switch the entire email host account which I have also done several times in the past. Or worse yet, have them force a switch when the company hosting the email gets sold.
All I'm really saying is having a free email addy at a large company - the MS/Google/Yahoo trio - that is likely to stay in business and provide decent free service can really offset bad paid hosting at another company no matter if it seems unprofessional one way or the other. Any system can be correct as long as one takes the time to research and configure the particular system they choose and knows the good and bad to what they have chosen.
I agree with the recommendation to go with a this@yourname.com email; it doesn't mean it is an absolute business imperative if one chooses not to go that way.
That's my experience and I'm sticking to it.
Speaking from a experience, I went down the multiple domain route and it became a royal pain in the toosh! Go with a single domain name and subdomains if necessary to expand beyond a single domain.
This will save you time and aggrivation, and increase the odds of someone remembering, sharing, guessing, or stumbling upon your URL.
And... having @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, etc, in your email address is unprofessional, and that is that. I know that you can set up gmail to send and receive as your other address, if you like to use gmail. You can even take it a step further and invisibly use gmail as the server for a custom address, but I think you may have to pay for that.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
Jim
and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately
important." C. S. Lewis
http://www.photosbyjimclark.com/
I use my own url as "send to" and "send from" and gmail as my email client. When you send from your own url via gmail the receiver can see that it is sent by gmail on behalf of - not that anyone cares really. If you pay for a gmail pro-account - like Smugmug does for photos - you can hide gmail altogether but I never thought it worth the money. Actually my clients think me sensible to use gmail rather than pretend to be running my own email system as if I were a big corporate.
Basically business is about having customers and providing the service they want. It does not matter much what your address is.
I would recommend investing in your own domain name and hosting it with someone reliable. It costs little and will last the lifetime of your business, even if you change host. You are free to shop for services like Smugmug and email, simply redirecting traffic should you ever decide to change your service provider.
Ferguson's suggestion of JimClark.biz seems sensible to me. Most of us run small businesses, even one person businesses, and clients do business with us as individuals. Having your name above the door has worked for shopkeepers for as long as there have been shops.
.
and if true, of infinite importance. The only
thing it cannot be is moderately
important." C. S. Lewis
http://www.photosbyjimclark.com/
You can think that all you want but there are cynical bastards like me out there who see a @gmail.com address and think, "pssh. amateur. next."
Your call.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
While you asked Chris email forwarding is what I do. My domain name hosting forwards my emails to a different email client. The customer only sees @aliceannys.com in the incoming/outgoing emails. The nice part of doing so is I can and do have multiple email addresses. When one is having technical difficulites (and I've yet seen one that hasn't gone down occasionally), I can redirect to another email address with a forward update.
In seriousness, why the cynicism surrounding which email client a business uses in this day and age? I still use Outlook Express and POP3 on some of my machines which aggregates my many emails into one email client. Some businesses do their entire business via Facebook (I'm not one) and are very successful yet in some instances it is seen as tacky. Why the cynicism with @gmail/@yahoo/@??? It interests me to know other business opinions.
Yes it's superficial, but appearances matter. Like dressing up for a job interview.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
My domain host routes every mail coming in to chris@mydomain to my gmail box. I use gmail to collect all my mail both business and personal and from some legacy addresses that are also set to forward to gmail. From gmail I can reply using any of my addresses.
One advantage in future is that I can easily move from gmail without having to change addresses. The same goes when you own your own domain name - you can move domain hosting company if need be. You might want to check with the Godaddy plan should you go with them - when I looked a while back I was not convinced that I would actually own my domain name and be able to move it to a different host without hassle - but I may be wrong.
At the moment I use my domain for my business website as well as email forwarding. So I have no link between my domain and my smugmug site. I am actually thinking of opening a second smugmug account to replace what I maintain myself on my domain because the new Smugmug looks much better than my Rapidwriter web site does. I will then leave my current Smugmug site as is, primarily for friends and family.
In recent years I managed web presence for several clients. One observation is that many visitors, even regular visitors, do not worry about remembering urls at all or typing them in. They will simply google and click through - so it is in my view most important to have your site clearly describe what you do. Secondly, an easy to remember and short company name is more important imo than whether it is .com, .biz, etc. So if your business was, say, jimpics.whatever, most people would simple Google jimpics and click through. Regular visitors would only have to remember you are called Jim and only need to type the j maybe. New visitors looking for a photographer in your town would simply type photos, your town, ...
Hope this helps...