Fusing words for website name: confusing or doable?

Question

Arguably UX starts with the domainname. Well perhaps a bit far-fetched, so please feel free to suggest what might be a bitter fit than UX.SE for this question, but here it is anyhow.

I'm looking at a website name (specifically parispot.com ) which I bought that pretty much sums up what I want to do: have a website about spots in Paris. (Parisspots.com was taken).

A potential UX problem with it is the obvious missing 's'. Instead the words 'Paris' and 'Spot' are fused together.

Now as someone who's first language isn't English, I'm Dutch, I feel Parispots.com** reads comfortable as 'paris spots' instead of 'paris pots', at least it should be pretty clear once you digested it. Of course, I'm biased though so I'd like to get an outside perspective.

Moreover, I'm a bit concerned the name feels slightly corny. What do you think?

Answer 1

I am a native English speaker, and when I saw the name for the first time, I took it as "Pari Spot" and assumed immediately that it was something to do with places in Paris.

From the different first impressions here, it is clear that there are large differences in the way that people see the name. However that really doesn't matter. Just because someone can't work out what you do from your name doesn't mean it's a poor name.

An ideal name should be: pronounceable, memorable, easy to spell, short, and descriptive. Think of the services that you use. How many of them are clear by their name only? It's more about how well you can recall the name, and what you associate with the name that matters. It's very unlikely that you will find any domain names for less than a small fortune that fulfill this.

So the question then becomes whether you are able to link 'parispot' to Paris and Spots in your customers mind. The French pronounce Paris as 'Pari' anyway - so no big loss there - and you can focus on the 'Spots' section with camelCase. So, use the name as PariSpots. Like that it is unlikely that anyone is going to associate you with pots.

Overall most new companies spend way too much time on choosing their name. The name of your company matters a lot less than you may think and an imperfect name is rarely, if ever, the reason for any failure.

Answer 2

Jan,

My personal opinion would be that only complete words should be used. As a native English speaker I had to look at "parispot.com" a few times and initially read it as 'paris pot'.

Sometimes leaving out a letter works, for example flickr.com. In the 'flickr' case it is a single word so you can not read it in different ways, and leaving out vowels in a word particularly when sending an SMS in English is very common so it is a style that people are used to.

You could try 'hightlightsofparis.com', but that gets a little confusing around the second word. 'parisianparadise.com' might suit your needs, buts its hard to know when I don't know the content of your site.

Apologies for the negative vibes but it is just my honest 2 cents

Answer 3

There was a similar situation at a work, where my colleague bought a domain, that fused together "perform" and "metric" to make "performetric". Because there was only one M, I read it as "perfor" and "metric".

Likewise, I am reading "Parispot" as "Paris Pot". I don't think people would read it as "Paris Spot" until someone told them how to pronounce it.