Naming your Blog

Obviously one of the very first things that you are going to do when creating a blog is choosing a name.

That is a lot harder than one might think (or perhaps it is exactly as hard as one might think!).

A couple of factors that I took into consideration when I choose the name for my blog (Light Speed Gaming).

First of all, I wanted the name to be the same as my domain name, so I started by typing in different ideas in the domain name registration of Blogger to see what was even available.

I also wanted my name to be short enough that people would remember it and of course it had to be relevant to the stuff that I was going to be blogging about.

Finally I wanted the name to reflect the tone of my writing.



So here are the things that I was trying to jam into my blog name choice, tetris style:

1) The name needed to be available as a blogger domain name so that people did not have to remember a separate blog name from the domain name.

2) The name had to be fairly short

3) I was going to write about science fiction movies, books and video games, as well as just video games in general and the name needed to reflect this

4) I wanted to write in a humorous tone, so I wanted a simple straight on name that signified a "light" attitude (So no "The Nexus Library of Enlightenment" for example)

So, here is where I can already share a tip that I found out after I named my blog.
You may be content with just having a ".blogspot" domain to start with, but pretty quickly you may consider that you should get a "real" domain name.
A normal domain name will set you back a massive 12$ a year, so it's hardly a big investment.

About two weeks after naming my site I decided that I wanted a non ".blogspot" domain name.

Unfortunately that was when I found out that "www.lightspeedgaming.com" was not available as a domain name (which should not really have surprised me, I guess).
Therefore I have ended up with the less than idea www.lightspeed-gaming.com.

So before choosing a name, a useful piece of advice could be to check out if the non ".blogspot" domain name is available, because it will probably annoy you greatly to have to change the domain name later!

Anyways, back to the name choice.

I wanted a name that conveyed science fiction but also a focus on video games, while keeping it simple and straightforward.

I feel that Light Speed Gaming hit that pretty well.
The "Light Speed" part is of course the reference to science fiction, which should be fairly intuitive for visitors to deduce.
And the "Gaming"... Well, even more so.

I also considered "Warp 9 Gaming", "Hyperspace Gamer" but felt that both had too clear connotations to specific pieces of sci-fi, which I did not want to directly affiliate myself with.