Well, actually it wasn’t all that official, but on the 21st of January 2008 I finally got the tastekid.com domain up and running and uploaded the new version (with the new design) of TasteKid. And that was pretty much it.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 10th, 2008.

This might be an unusual sequence of events for a web startup, but, after implementing the application, getting it online in a test environment, playing with Google AdWords and buying a domain, I was finally starting to think about getting a web design.

Even though I am an advocate of the importance of the true value of a product or service, the looks are certainly very important. I was satisfied with the functionality of my initial design, but in order to attract people I knew I had to come up with something much more eye-candy than that. One of the reasons I postponed the moment of getting a professional web design was that it was the only thing I actually had to pay for (besides the domain name).

I talked with Romi @ AdWorks Media, who, for a reasonable amount of money, came up with the look and feel that Emmy has today. I thank him for that, it is truly great work.

I also want to mention here xX-Faith-Xx, who drawn Emmy’s first sketch, without knowing it (I later asked permission for using the sketck, but it wasn’t drawn for this project – to quote her, it was “just a crap drawing, drawn in the car”).

Last, but not least, I’ll mention my brother Felix here, who helped me with some wicked tweaks, like getting the tooltip (that appears when mouse-overing the “?” icons) done and working properly.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 10th, 2008.

The next step was to buy a domain name. Although many would have probably done this long before going public, or even before developing the application, most certainly before starting an AdWords campaign, I though getting the application up and running was more important. While online marketing and branding are paramount to any product and service, I think nowadays there is too much buzz surrounding these aspects, almost as if they are more important than the product or service itself.

This type of view also applies on the domain names market. People are buying domains only because they are cheap, not because they are committed to do something with them. Specialized companies are trading large amounts of domains, making a business from reserving domains containing certain keywords, then selling them on a bigger price to other companies and individuals that, most often, end up doing nothing with them. Although I have quite liberal views and I believe in the open market, I think that this trade layer between registration authorities and truly interested clients has many of the characteristics of a parasite.

Even though many interesting domain names are already reserved, usually by such companies that buy them only hoping to sell for profit, I think there are still a lot of free catchy domains out there. After a couple of days of searches, I came up with TasteKid.com for this project, and I must say I am very pleased with it.

Although I’m far from being an expert, and there are many places where you can find suggestions about finding a good domain name, here are some of my advices:

1. Unless you are keen on buying a precise domain, try to find one that is still available – that is, not already registered; it will be much cheaper, you won’t feed the companies that make a living from selling and buying domains and you will have the satisfaction of finding a domain that no one thought about before. Search for available domains using one of the many available tools, like http://www.checkdomain.com/.

2. Try to find a short domain. I know, many short domains are already taken, but there are still a lot of them out there. What does short mean? Obviously it’s very hard to find anything unregistered bellow 6 characters on the .com market. I would 6 to 10 characters, but that is not a rule. Think though that a shorter domain means people will remember it more easily, type it faster in the address bar, and, maybe most important, subconsciously giving it more trust. Think of a Google result page for some music-related query, what would you choose between a spinner.com result and a freemusicforeverybody.com result? I think many of us would chose spinner.com, even though the second domain name is more descriptive.

3. Be careful when thinking about going for other TLDs than .com. Even though .net, .biz and other TLDs may offer a lot more available domain names, people are more reluctant to trust these and have become used to thinking quality web sites have usually .com domain names. There are a lot of successful exceptions, one of them being Last.fm, and hopefully people attitude will change over time, but still think twice before going for it. Obviously this doesn’t apply to regional (contry) TLDs, that are trusted by people living in that particular country. Also, think twice before using numbers or hyphens in your domain name. These may be catchy in some instances, but then again, they usually are driving people away.

4. Think outside the box. If you sell cheap cars, your domain name doesn’t have to contain “cars”, “buy” and “cheap” in it. You can later optimize your site for these keywords, but in my opinion it is more important for a domain to be short and catchy than descriptive. Of course, if you manage to get a domain that contains a keyword related to what the site is about, that is very good. But don’t become frustrated if you can’t find something too descriptive. Your domain is your brand, and your brand should be, first of all, original. buy-cheap-cars.com has nothing original in it.crazycars.com, well, that would be an improvement, don’t you think?

5. Play with words. Think of a few words that you wold like at least one of them to be contained in your domain name. Then add other words to them, maybe less related to what you do. There are keywords suggestion tools available online, that may help you with this game.

6. Search and ask for advice. Read articles like this one, use online domain name suggestion tools. Tell about the domain name you are thinking about buying to your friends, business partners or family. Take into consideration their feedback, but remember that first reactions in situations like these are not always very relevant. Just think about a friend asking you about your opinion on the domain “google.com”, before Google emerged. I bet you would have said something like “But it doesn’t even mean anything!”. So don’t overdo it.

7. When you find a domain name that you like, don’t think too much about buying it. There is always that thought that “maybe I can find an even better one”, but don’t leave this thought take over you. Remember, as important as the domain name is, there are many other things much more important, like the web site you will host on that domain. And, most often, after you buy the domain, you start to get attached to it and to like it even more.

Good luck!

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 10th, 2008.

It is my believe that users are looking for simple, though useful applications. Although my recommendation engine was providing users with suggestions in terms of music, movies and books, they had to perform the time-consuming operation of looking up on Google or specialized entertainment websites each and every one of these suggested resources in order to find out more about them.

Users should be able to easily find out more about Emmy’s suggestions, so, to simplify this process, I came up with the tooltip idea: A small “?”-shaped icon near each suggestion, that, upon mouse-over, triggers a tool-tip that displays information about that particular item.

I wrote a script that grabs information about bands and movies from Wikipedia, but I still have to validate each and every one of these teasers due to some non-standard issues that lead to grabbing the wrong articles every once in a while. I started with the most popular resources, and as for today, Emmy know about a couple of thousand items.

After a while, I thought that this can be furthered improved by presenting the user with a YouTube video regarding each resource. A song for music, a movie trailer for movies.

This way, he or she can now make a first impression about every one of Emmy’s suggestions, without having to perform a single click.

I still have some further improvements for the preview tooltip on my todo list, like a mechanism for preventing “no longer available” movies to appear.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 11th, 2008.