Domain Names

Funny, I would have picked the "Baking for Dummies" book. Perhaps it's because I am a novice at cooking and don't necessarily want the <i>best</i> book on baking at the moment, just an introductory one; and I can be pretty sure the Dummies book will be decent since it is part of a well-known series.<p>Likewise with these StackExchange sites; some of them I had no idea they were stackexchange sites until I actually visited them. It took quite a while to click on their links after seeing them around the net in some cases. Had it been superuser.stackexchange.com I would have immediately known it would probably be a high-caliber Q&#38;A site.<p>I guess I'm an outlier on both points?

This title is editorializing a little bit: it refers to a throwaway comment in a longer, more interesting article.

If you're wondering about the reference to being "Influenced by Ries and Trout", it's a reference to the book <i>Positioning: The Battle for your Mind</i>, which I've recommended on HN before and will continue to do so - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/0071373586" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/007...</a><p>It talks about the importance of standing out in your marketplace, because consumers want simple purchasing decisions so will only, at best, compare the top few.

I wonder how this relates to Reddit. Both sites (SO and Reddit) have unique, community driven and created sections.<p>Would a site like Reddit benefit from turning some of these sections into top-level domains? I know that they are having financial issues right now, and could this be a possible step to move away from their problems into something that would be profitable?

I wonder if he's referring to experts-exchange with that dashes comment?

I think Joel misses the point about brands; whilst still getting the decision right :)<p>Stack Overflow <i>is</i> a brand - in it's visuals and how it works.<p>The name is where it gets interesting; because often products are "branded" using their name - but not always. And this is one case where there is absolutely no need to brand the sites using the Stack Overflow name - doing so would be like branding it the same way as the supermarket own brand of a top class store. i.e. the store is quality, the goods are quality, but the brand name makes it look cheap :)

Seems like that's simultaneously missing an opportunity to capitalize on their brand <i>and</i> missing an opportunity to strengthen their brand.

<i>"we decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy."</i><p>Doesn't Craigslist fly in the face of this theory?

The most important and valuable aspect of a top level domain is that it can be treated as an individual asset if there is an opportunity to sell it (or if it needs to be split away from the parent organization for some other reason).<p>To support this, it's ideal if all of its resources (images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.) are also served from within the domain, without being dependent on other domains owned by the parent organization (code can still be shared by using symlinks or multiple virtual hosts pointing to the same resources). This should help simplify any transfer.

Exchange sites <i>are</i> part of a series.<p>The real question is not about some abstract branding truth: people trust/don't trust series.<p>They should be asking whether they want to accentuate or deaccentuate the grouping. Do they want good brand equity to flow between them. Do they want to avoid bad brand equity (brand liability?) to flowing? Do they want the sites to feel more independent?<p>Relying on 'series are bad' as justification is like when clients tell me that blue makes their clients feel like buying.

I'm leery of nearly any domain with hyphens in it, as it almost always feels like an Adsense site with either low quality or scraped content.<p>To me, dashes reek of desperate SEO.

I think their argument about series domains vs standalone names is actually backward. If people like the StackOverflow format you want to easily attract those people to the other sites that use the same engine. You want cross-polination of visitors, and you probably want to get some PageRank momentum of the established base domain name.

If the quality is excellent and the name isn't tacky (e.g. for Dummes), then I think a series is much more beneficial. There's no way I'd compare '..for Dummies!' books and StackExchange on anywhere near equal footing.

Can someone explain the dashes reek of desperation bit?

domains with dashes tend to be easier to read, imo