Search with Design

Luke and I have come up with a great idea for a new consulting business come web application that has the ability to evolve over the next 5 years or so. It provides a service used by huge amounts of people every year, but that has been traditionally handled by a professional. The hook is that we would use SEO tricks, social networking and quality design and style to augment (or replace) the activities of the professional. Let me see if I can explain more clearly with an example…

Let’s say yachting suddenly becomes extremely popular. Folks who already own yachts might see their’s begin to go up in value. To find a buyer for your yacht you can employ a broker for a % of the sale amount and he will track down a buyer, do some negotiating, etc. Because the broker has never really been in a “hot” yacht market before, he only knows his old tricks: calling his friends in the boat business, placing a classifieds ad, etc.

If we were to apply our model in the target industry (sorry, the boats are just a metaphor, we’re not in the yachting market… yet) we would create a stylish one-page site for each yacht, we would make it a thirdlevel domain on our aged and SEO’d website (say TradeWinns.YachtParty.com), and we would make the social/viral elements easy to access and use. The one-page design would also allow buyers to browse a ton of yachts in a day, and because we’ve standardized the photo gallery, the pricing info, the features, etc. it’s all very easy to compare.

Now, a few other ‘YachtParty.com’ ideas have sprung up already, but none of them have been successful. We believe it’s because the first adopters of the idea are trying to hard to replace the Yacht brokers instead of allowing them to gain value from the system too. Also, a lot of these websites list way too many items on the page, when buyers only really want to see pretty pictures and a price first, and then browse a features list and so forth second. They don’t need to know what the weather is like where the boat is docked.

So here’s our hurdle: we can’t think of a name. The industry in which we’re operating is highly saturated with spam and personal sites, and almost every domain name we can come up with is taken or subpar. Here’s a list of how we’ve approached it so far:

1. We’ve tried coming up with 10 names we liked and trying those out, without doing any pre-research.
2. We’ve tried brute force dictionary combinations, using a thesaurus and WhoIs to find unused combinations
3. We’ve tried stepping way outside the boundaries of our idea to drive at the concept of why people buy or sell a yacht.
4. We’ve recently tried to go Web2.0 and drop the ‘e’ off of a fun word (yachtr or sailr anyone?).

That’s where we’re at now. Do you have any tips on how you find a good domain name? We could really use the help.

Okay, it’s just about time to kick this blog off.

SearchwithDesign is the companion blog to our business, 97percent.com. Here we have an opportunity to riff on the main theme of our work without having to be in a client-provider situation. So first things first, a round of introductions…

I’m the first half of SearchwithDesign. I started out making websites for real estate investors and real estate agents back in my hometown of Tucson. I got really interested in the promotion side of things while working on a particularly large website. Trying to compete for major search terms is part art form, part voodoo, part networking, and part math. It’s the perfect fit for me. While working for a small online software company, I ran into Luke, who is the design half of search with design.

Hopefully Luke can fill in some of his own bio here, but for now I’ll say that he’s got a great eye for design, and I’ve never heard him say that something is impossible. If you set him on a task, you can bet that he will have something to show for it within an hour.

So the two of us will be posting here on topics we find interesting but not necessarily within the confines of our specialties, and probably not even within the topic of search and web design.

Okay, now that the introduction is over, we can get on with the posts.