What's in a name?

"What's in a name?
That which we call
'rose',

by any other name would
smell as sweet"

In order to run a successful auction website, you need to have a good name.
Some important 'good name' criteria might include:

1. Short, snappy title
2. One that people will remember, maybe even comment on
3. One that describes the contents of the website

How to choose a good name? I did a few searches around the net and there are a lot of sites which directly rip off eBay. Then there are the ones which have something really obvious in the name about selling or buying or bidding online, isell, yousell, webid. It would be easy to get lost in the list of least traffic.

When searching, you do get a little bit focussed - a small amount of tunnel vision creeps in...

So, then I did a search in online dictionaries and thesauruses(thesauri, thesauriums?) and started looking for words to do with selling, auctions, bidding etc etc.

The objective was to have the shortest word possible but still be on topic. And that is how, 'Duds' came into view. Cool articles of clothing for a snappy dresser - an ideal name for an auction website.

I had had the idea that there was a need for a website to help people sell the little things. Little knick-knacks, clothes, etc. i.e. those items on which there is a potential to lose money on eBay because, once you have paid the fees, you are totally out of pocket.

And so e-DUDS.com was born.

I liked it, a nice snappy, memorable name, which rolls off the tongue, with a totally cool meaning.

Do you remember I mentioned about the potential blinkers earlier? the tunnel vision?

Well, one of the first members asked why I had named my site after an unexploded bomb? i.e. a 'Dud'. Or a 'Squib' if you like things in Harry Potter terms.

I still didn't get it. I still thought the majority of people thought of duds as clothes rather than anything else. And I had already bought the domain name and paid for the software and they had already set up the name on all the pages. But it all still seemed to have negative connotations.


Rather lamely, I decided that a good thing would be to have a definition on the website. So I paid through the nose and got the software designer to insert a definition onto each page. And this is what it said:

"Duds: definition: Informal term for articles of clothing. (16th century)"

Yes, OK. I know. Very internet, very web 2.0.

Why do they say 'paying through the nose?' It probably has some sort of horrible medieval connotations. On various websites it says things about debtors having horrible things done to their noses if they couldn't pay their creditors. But wouldn't that be 'paying with your nose'?

Pay up or the nose gets it!

Terrible depths of gloom and depression...

... could have descended, but then hey, if websites such as 'Yahoo' can be famous and popular, and if 'Google' can become a household verb, then why not?

e-DUDS fulfills 2 out of the 3 criteria straight away - short, memorable and of the dictionary websites I visited today, 4 only mentioned that it is an informal term for clothes and 2 mentioned that it could be clothes, or - well, yes, an unexploded bomb.

And personally, I think that if Donald Trump can overcome the hurdles of that name and get to where he is, then so can e-DUDS.com

www.e-DUDS.com
http://www.illustrationsof.com/