My Tale of Woe

When I finally decided that I was going to create a website, the obvious place for me to start was the name. The name is the first thing a visitor sees, so it couldn’t be something I just pulled out of a hat. I had to give this considerable amount of thought.

At first, I had this idea to use most beautiful combination of sounds in the English language (phonetically). You know, the kind of word that just sounds beautiful, it rolls off the tongue, and the actual definition of the word is not considered. To anyone who didn’t speak English, it would sound like music...just saying it would be soothing on its own.

That was the thought, anyway. When I found a study that someone conducted to find that word, I found that, while he’s probably right, this wasn’t going to work.

The most beautiful word(s) in the English language: Cellar Door.

Now, if you say that out loud it’s quite beautiful. But unfortunately, it doesn’t generate the most beautiful image (*cough*). Plus, that domain was taken. I had to scrap it.

Then I started looking for foreign words that meant something relating to what the site was all about (stuff like ‘calm’, ‘escape’, ‘relief’, and ‘breathe’ *foreshadowing*). I tried every language in Google Translate (don’t judge), but I failed miserably. I was still holding onto the idea that the word should sound beautiful. Nothing really stood out to me.

I only thing I got out of that process was some German. Ich kann sprechen ein bisschen Deutsch, aber ich kann nicht Domain Name finden.

Anyway, that was out. At this point, I was coming up with my own words. I don’t even want to revisit some of the terrible concoctions I had considered, but there was one that I really ended up liking: Miro. It looks cool, sounds cool, and it rolls of the tongue. And design-wise, the word was visually fluid; I was already coming up with logo ideas.

But then, I search for it. There’s already a ‘Miro’. And you know what it is?

A LAME KNOCK OFF OF ITUNES, THAT’S WHAT.

The domain was taken, anyway. After I explored Miro a bit (passive aggressively) to discover all of its glorious inferiority, I had to cool down and regroup.

Wait…

Calm down. Breath. Take a deep breath.

…

…

…

TAKE A BREATHER! :D

But breather.com was taken. So I had to settle for breathr.

BUT breathr.com was also taken. See, there are these terrible, terrible people out there who buy a bunch of domain names and set up ‘placeholder’ sites. They don’t do anything. They just say that “this domain is registered and you can’t use it unless you buy it from us”. This practice is technically called ‘cybersquatting’, but my mom and I call them domain trolls.

I contacted the person who owned breathr.com to ask them what they wanted for it. Usually, domain names are really cheap (somewhere around ten dollars). I wasn’t really expecting them to write me back, but when they did, I wasn’t expecting this.

They wanted $10,000 for breathr.com.

Nope. Sorry. I just have to settle for breathr.net.

So there it is, my tale of woe. I really am happy with the name. It took a while to get there, but it was worth it in the end. If you want to find out if a domain name is taken or not, I would suggest Google Domains, Hostway, or GoDaddy. And here is an example of a domain troll site, if you ever encounter them. Unless you’re willing to spend upwards of $10,000, then I wouldn’t bother contacting them.