Webapps.stackexchange.com versus Nothingtoinstall.com

Question

Related StackOverflow Blog post:

Domain Names: The Wrong Question

Nothing to Install is a fine name, probably one of the best in the network. Yet, it's confusing to have half the people talking about Webapps and half Nothing To Install.

Considering...

1. Naming (domain name selection) is really hard.

   Not all communities seem able to do it, as in they can't even agree on which is the "least worst" (literally) of their choices.

2. Many names, much confusion

   When users see a Wikipedia link in their search results, they know what to expect. Hopefully when users see a stackexchange.com link they would also know to expect high quality Q&A. But what can they expect when they see nothingtoinstall.com or one of 25+ other domains? Unknown. Additionally, Google traffic makes up a HUGE percentage of our traffic and it hurts our Google ranking by breaking up into a series of top-level domains. That means less eyeballs, and ultimately less Q&A.

3. Web Apps is also Nothing To Install

   The confusion that some people are talking about Web Apps while others are talking about "Nothing to Install". That will pass but become a bigger, more confusing problem as the network grows and we have (currently) 25+ different pairs of domain names to refer to!

What do you think about each site maintaining their sitename.stackexchange.com (webapps.stackexchange.com) name?

It has been requested on a large number of meta sites in the up-and-coming Stack Exchange communities?

Answer 1

I'm just going to take this straight from the horse's mouth:

American audiences, generally, don’t trust series. They tend to believe that they want the best baking book, period, not whatever baking book comes in yellow. When they see a shelf full of yellow dummy books, they mostly say, “yeah, a bunch of second-best books.”

...

Influenced by Ries and Trout, we decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.

But I digress. We’re building best of breed Q&A sites for the new Stack Exchange Network 2.0, and we would rather have a team of individual sites rather than a bunch of subdomains that remind you of nothing more than the chart you saw when you went to the library that one time in college, with the Dewey Decimal system explained. 100 Philosophy. 200 Religion. 300 Social Sciences. 400 Language and pornographic magazines. BORING.

Yes, that's right. Joel Spolsky wrote that about Stack Exchange.

And I agree with every word of it. The .stackexchange.com domain might work for some communities (particularly the very technology-oriented ones) but is terrible marketing for most sites.

Give me The Joy of Cooking or Larousse Gastronomique, not Cooking for Dummies.

Give me Code Complete or The Mythical Man-Month, not Programming for Dummies.

Give me Stack Overflow, not Programming Stack Exchange.

Give us proper domain names. Give us identities.

Naming isn't as hard as you make it out to be - many communities have already settled on them; the confusion will pass very quickly while the site is still small but it will be much harder to make the switch when the site is large; and the 25+ domain names is something that only the team is going to care about, not the users, and even that won't take long to adjust to (you still have to memorize all the subdomain names under the current system).

And while there might be some highly-dubious argument that putting everything under stackexchange.com might be marginally better for the googlejuice, what's really good for googlejuice is building a brand and brand loyalty and getting lots and lots of activity, and that's not going to come with a stuffy name like stackexchange.com and a bunch of subdomains. It just isn't. I can see the lights go off whenever I talk about our cooking site and utter the words "Stack Exchange" - these days I try to avoid saying it at all, waiting for the day when we finally get our own domain.

Now you're suggesting that day isn't going to come? Well, forget about promotion then, because it'll be almost impossible to do. We'll be the big yellow "for dummies" of the web.

Answer 2

"Web Applications" is a topic, not a name.

When I refreshed the main page and saw the new logo — for those who don't know, it's just "Web Applications" in plain black text — I thought it looked like a sub-page of a much larger website. If I visited hp.com and searched for the latest drivers for my laptop, I would expect to see "Pavilion dm3t" in that same font and location.

When I visit facebook, I don't want the title bar to read "Friends." When I visit Chowhound, I don't want the logo at the top of the page to say "Food discussion." When I visit hulu, I don't want the logos to say "Assorted videos." You get the point. Our sites need real names and identities.

Besides, if we stick with webapps.stackexchange.com, are we going to change Stack Overflow to programming.stackexchange.com? *.stackexchange.com is okay in beta, when we're still feeling out the boundaries and spitballing ideas, but that's it. Real names maintain consistency.

Also, specific response to point #3: if the name is Nothing to Install, then call it Nothing to Install. Having this nebulously defined hybrid naming thing is just about the only thing worse than sticking with Web Applications.

Yes, naming is hard. Most things worth doing are hard. And people don't like change; that's just how we're wired. But you don't see facebook losing all of its members whenever it rolls out a redesign, even though people get up in arms about it every time. Eventually people will get used to it and we'll be wondering how we ever got along without things being the way they are.

Answer 3

If you want to look at network branding, take a gander at the Gawker spread of sites. Kotaku, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and io9. All with their own names, URLs and communities.

They're for different audiences and marketed to them specifically. Not as generic, lump-based chunks of a whole. But all recognizable as part of the larger Gawker umbrella.

It's not ProductivityPorn.Gawker, it's Lifehacker.

Rely on quality results being returned in searches. Not on lazy brand marketing.

If you can't work out a good name, just don't graduate the site outside of its beta period.

Don't make people think it's full-fledged by leaving the non-sketchy design in place. No matter how nice it looks, giving an SE site its own look but denying the community to champion it with a distinct, non-subdomained name (however bad) is being two minds of branding and building.

Answer 4

_____.stackexchange.com? Yuck.

^{'nuf said.}

Answer 5

_{I find this silly for a variety of reasons, and also mildly offensive (not unlike some other questions we saw at meta.Gaming.SE) given the amount of effort that communities are still pouring into getting good domain names in the justifiably tight restraints given.}

_{I'm going to assume those questions really are "toughballs" aimed to test the solidity of the choices and the communities behind them, however.}

---

The choice here is between site branding and engine branding.

On the one side we have stackoverflow.com, on the other we have programming.stackexchange.com.

On the one side we have the community side of NTI, on the other the corporate side of StackOverflow Internet Services, Inc.

On the one side we have the community SO, Inc. wants to sell ads to, on the other side we have the Q&A engine SO, Inc. gave up on selling.

On the one side we have all the added value of Area51's terraforming service, on the other side we have an excellent web service with a few competitors, some of them FOSS.

I really think this should be a no brainer. The real added value SO, Inc. brings to the table comes from the community, not the web service.

Trying to brand the engine, rather than the community, really is a non sequitur.

I don't like the idea of me telling you how to make your business -- I really have no place to. This is just my humble, non-advertiser non-entrepreneur non-paying non-paid opinion. I just can't help but feel this really is a no-brainer. Here, have a grain of salt to go with it.

Bonus content: feelings on chat.meta.programming.stackexchange.com chat.meta.stackoverflow.com about this surreptitious change.

Answer 6

Sitting firmly on the fence I can see merits in both types of domain name, however having a sub-domain does give the impression that the site is somehow 2nd class when compared to Stack Overflow or Super User.

Additionally I think part of the problem stems from the relatively long public beta with the "temporary" name. If the name had been chosen early on then all the references would have been to "NothingToInstall.com" (or whatever had been chosen), rather than "WebApps.StackExchange.com". It also didn't help that there was relatively little publicity of the impending name change.

Not sure what the answer is.

Answer 7

Think of this, would this ever happended if the site was called servers.stackexchange.com?

Source: The Official Server Fault Blog

Answer 8

non-tech users do not "understand" subdomains. non-tech users do not care about where the stuff "is", they "google" it. they open a new firefox window and type what they want into the largest text-field they can identify and then just hit "enter". that text-field is most likely the "window to a search engine". and thats it.

whatever pops up in the first 2 - 5 results is where they are going to click. "hey, i want to go to my gmail ... i type in gmail in the big text-field over there and enter .. then i click there and then i read my mail". (thats real, i ve seen people doing that).

the only "reputation" you need to worry about is the ranking in the search engine. if you want to trick google into "ranking a certain site into the top 10 results" then you have to build up some kind of fake reputation by setting up lots of small sattelite websites which are all "relevant" to the topic / theme of the site you want to promote and then let "page rank" do the rest.

luckily for the whole stackexchange.com group you already have satellites. and you have very very relevant BIG sites with lots of relevant content. and these satellites are all interconnected (and increase the reputation and the relevance (page rank) of each site).

if you combine these satellites into one big (death) star, what will be the result? you might have one big very well ranked site with lots and lots and lots of content. if the more relevant stuff people are pointing to is in (lets say) sub_cooking.stackexchange.com and only a few folks link to the (relativly) weak material in sub_potatoes.stackexchange.com .. is it better for the end-user that this weak material pops up "eventually" (depending on the ranking algorithm) before good material from other sites?

as i said in the beginning: the domain is completely irrelevant for the non-tech user.

Answer 9

I'm absolutely in favour of nothingtoinstall.com. Who cares about Stack Exchange as an engine except for us enthusiasts / fans / SOFU power users? More importantly, should others care? Is that a priority for a new site to succeed?

To make an impression on outsiders, professionals, experts in the field of a SE site, the site needs to develop a strong brand in its area of interest, not the network. Each site, while based on the same generic principles, will have their own spirit, community, communication style, moderation style, and varying boundaries of what is acceptable and what isn't.

The fact that there is a network of similar sites should be totally secondary.

In fact, I tend to believe that introducing new users to too many sites in the network at once is already doing more harm than good. There is so much interesting stuff that at least I feel a tendency of diffusion of energy and time, instead of concentrating on becoming a power user on one site. Oh, there's a bicycling SE! Need to get into that, and collect some reputation so people will take me seriously and so I can ask the occasional question. Oh and arts! And language! And translation! And drawing comics! And camping & survival! And web applications!... and so on and so on. Let's not strengthen this trend further by stressing the network aspect even more.

Let each site grow in its own way, with its own domain name and branding.

Answer 10

The aim of the SE sites is of course to attract the experts on each topic to answer questions. As Yahoo Answers shows, the way to do this is not to have one gigantic brand. While Yahoo Answers doesn't limit its scope, there are many questions you simply cannot get answers to, because the people doing the answering don't have any benefits from going there.

Generalising, experts need a community (of experts) to attract them. If they can't get answers from other experts for the hardest questions, there is no reason for them to be there.

Having an individualised name, design, etc. lead to increasing that sense of community. SE as a whole is too big to have a single community, so branding them all as ___.stackexchange.com will not attract more experts. It may increase awareness of the SE brand, as opposed to the NothingToInstall brand, but, the experts won't see a community. They will see a company expanding into an area. Is there much of a community for the Maths section in Yahoo Answers? Let's have a look. Nope. There is a bunch of high school students trying to get others to do their homework for them.

At the end of the day, a name like Stack Overflow is more appealing to the experts than programming.stackexchange.com. And you know it too. There is no chance of SO accepting that name change. So why force it on other communities?

In general, Yahoo Answers is to StackExchange, what Experts Exchange was to Stack Overflow. And trying to brand all the areas into one is very much a step closer to a Yahoo Answers style site, rather than the collection of expert communities that is the StackExchange ideal.

Answer 11

You're hurting the individual sites by tying all their fates together like this. You're trying to make it sound like having a distinct name for a site (any name) doesn't matter. You're wrong. I understand that the decision is made, but I'm predicting it will prove to be a mistake. I guess time will tell.

Seems like all you care about is the Google ranking of all the sites collectively, not whether an individual site can stand on its own feet. But over time, Google will learn that ".stackexchange.com" doesn't really mean very much after all, since it has 100 subdomains. What amount of weight do you think Google is giving to ".co.uk"? I know Google drives your traffic; my point is that over time the SE subdomain will mean less and less to Google, and it will put more and more weight behind the quality of the content (or lack thereof). You're trying to game the system, and that is only ever a temporary measure with Google.

Now you've made it so that there's no difference between the name of a site that's in beta and a site that's not. In other words, when I see "stackexchange.com" in search results, I'm going to think "oh well, who knows if that site will even be around in 6 months."

Let me ask you this: is the site ready to stand alone or not? 'webapps.stackexchange.com' is not out of beta, regardless of what the design is or whether it says BETA on it. You're taking the stance that since it doesn't have enough traffic to satisfy you, it's only Beta level 2. You still don't think it's good enough to stand alone.

Only when it manages to get over the "you must be this tall to enter" line will you allow it to try standing alone, but by that time all the links all over the web (and there will be plenty, because you waited so long) will be to the old name, so you'll punish the site for changing its name.

They're all going to go down together if you do this. Just change the name of the group from stackexchange to about.com and be done with it. That's the direction this "network effect" is headed.

Answer 12

Just my experience of this:

I had been using webapps for months, really getting a lot out of it, then someone tweeted about nothingtoinstall, I went there, wasn't logged in, I thought it was a stackechange clone and so I left. It wasn't until after a couple days when Jeff Atwood tweeted about it that I went back and realized the name had changed and signed back in and started using it again.

So two suggestions:

1. at the beginning, have a banner that says, "(old site) was renamed to (new site)".
2. plus permanently, have an icon on the site that clearly identifies the new site as a bonafide member of the stackexchange community which, to me, insures that (a) there is the proper critical mass of people behind it to make it useful, and (b) it will stick around for the long run

Answer 13

The company goal went from building great communities, to building a great network of unrelated sites. Although this change will help the name stackexchange it will hurt the individual communities.

Yes naming is hard, and it isn't needed for all communities. But by taking away the name, you're taking the "cool" and hence some of the excitement out of the community...

• Google's name is not "Search Engine" that wouldn't be cool.
• Apple's name is not "Phone, hardware and operating systems" that wouldn't be cool.
• Microsoft's name isn't "Operating systems and software"
• stackoverlfow's name isn't "Coding questions"
• ...

See my inline comments below which address each of your concerns.

Not all communities seem able to do it, as in they can't even agree on which is the "least worst" (literally) of their choices.

The community should have the decision to keep their name as webapps.stackexchange.com. If you simply provide a list of reasons why this is good for the community I'm sure most communities would make that decision.

When users see a Wikipedia link in their search results, they know what to expect. Hopefully when users see a stackexchange.com link they would also know to expect high quality Q&A. But what can they expect when they see nothingtoinstall.com or one of 25+ other domains? Unknown.

Wikipedia is one community, the whole idea of stackexchange is to have a bunch of focused communities. If you wanted one community you'd have Yahoo! answers all over again. If you are designing for first rate communities then your members will be overall disjoint. If you are designing for second rate communities filled with only programmers then seeing .stackexchange.com is useful.

Also no one would need to remember 25+ domain names. If a member wanted to be part of every one of those communities they would be a pretty useless member to each of those communities. People only need to remember the 1, 2 or 3 communities they are a part of.

Additionally, Google traffic makes up a HUGE percentage of our traffic and it hurts our Google ranking by breaking up into a series of top-level domains. That means less eyeballs, and ultimately less Q&A.

If this is really about page rank then wouldn't rolling stackoverflow into a .stackexchange.com really help out the page rank? Ditto serverfault and superuser? Wouldn't that also help build the "This is quality content" thought? Since those communities are good and do provide quality content?

I'm not saying here that I think we should change to stackoverflow.stackexchange.com but I am saying the above because it proves that the concern isn't as big as you make it out to be.

The confusion that some people are talking about Web Apps while others are talking about "Nothing to Install".

Jeff posted a comment on an answer to this question which says that after a community gets to the size of serverfault then they will consider giving a name to that community. If you guys really had a concern here that comment shouldn't have been posted.

That will pass but become a bigger, more confusing problem as the network grows and we have (currently) 25+ different pairs of domain names to refer to!

Again you're trying to build a network when you should be trying to build great communities.

---

Are you losing hype for your community?

I think you probably will in the end. For example I would blog about a topic that interests me when a new site is launched but I wouldn't blog that a new subdomain was created to an existing network. The second boom in people blogging and talking about your site really helps the community growth.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=nothingtoinstall right now has a ton of entries referring to nothingtoinstall going live.

Answer 14

Smoke and mirrors:

I feel like this whole process was smoke and mirrors so that the portion of the community which was against this change would be happy that you asked first. There may be some assumptions below, but I'm sure most of the community feels this way and so that is why I am taking the time to write this message.

The feedback wanted email which was sent to members:

Sending out an email blast to be sure everyone would see it, and within a few hours reverting the site before enough feedback could be given. Surely the decision was already made. Why was the email blast needed? I'm not sure but maybe you wanted to make the change within a few hours, you had to make sure people seen it quick.

The quick reversal back to webapps.stackexchange.com:

There are a lot of changes made since the original post.

• The logo was reverted
• The domain name redirect was reversed
• The old blog post of the 7 essential questions of every public beta was changed to take out domain naming
• The nothing to install announcement was changed
• I imagine a company meeting was needed to give the go ahead with the board
• The links in the footer of https://stackoverflow.com/ and other sites were changed to webapps from nothingtoinstall
• I'm sure several other tasks were done too to accomplish the reverting within that timeframe.

Most if not all of this as accomplished within a few short hours of posting the question itself.

Network wide decision at the site level:

Another problem I have is that this network wide decision was made at the site level instead of in a meta where everyone can participate.

The problem was somewhat disguised slightly giving the impression that this change was about only this site but really it was about every site in the network. I know you mention other sites in the body of the question, but the question title itself is very misleading for one of the biggest decisions made in months which affects the entire network (Webapps.stackexchange.com versus Nothingtoinstall.com)

A company is allowed to make its own decisions:

I have no problem with a company taking charge and making decisions on their own, but I do have a problem when a company pretends that its members are in charge and deliberately puts on a show to trick the community into thinking they are in charge. In other words don't waste my time by asking me to answer if your mind is already made up.

Answer 15

I think #2 is the most important point. When I see the domain stackexchange.com, I know that I can usually find my answer on the site. If I had to remember a list of 25+ domains I can trust, it would become tedious.

The only drawback I see, as @phwd noted, is the longer name.

Answer 16

Regarding naming:

All names communities have come up with suck... this may be true, but it's because of the restrictions that were imposed on the community and not because of an inability of a community to execute.

I have a feeling that the real heart of the issue is that everyone thinks naming is hard. That's not completely true, the truth is finding a .com domain name for a matching good name is hard.

Other than naming, the rest of the arguments in the question can be ignored based on the justification given in my previous answer.

Since finding a .com domain naming for a matching site name is so hard, perhaps the community should come up with a good name and then consider which types of domain names they can get for that name. Two distinct things, not one.

Don't sacrifice the name, sacrifice the TLD or use an abbreviation:

For example a .org for some communities may work. A .net for some other communities may work. I think something like (Web Addict, webaddict.net) or (Web Geek, webgeek.org) is better than (Nothing to install, nothingtoinstall.com) and (WebApps, webapps.stackexchange.com).

A short form domain of the full name may also be acceptable for some sites. An example of this is my own company, our name is VisionWorks Solutions, and our domain for the past 6 years has been vwsolutions.com, it has served us well. Another example Hewlett-Packard -> hp.com, the site is known to most even know it is a short for for the full name.

In conclusion, split it up:

Perhaps the whole problem is tying domain name with naming together in one. We would then have the 7 essential questions of every public beta turn into 8.

• What should our name and domain be?
• What should our name be?
• What should our domain be?

Answer 17

If there are compelling practical reasons for not using individual domains - after reading the whole discussion thrice, I'm ready to accept that there may be - how about building a middle ground: Having a better top domain than stackexchange.com?

This would not mean renaming the Stack Exchange project as a whole. Just shorten the parent domain the sites are a child of.

Ideas:

• I think se.com would be really great, but it's in commercial use as a sub-domain service so you'd have to lease whichever names you need. Maybe it's worth asking them anyway. Maybe the whole sub-domain business isn't working out for them and they're open for a sale or long-term lease of the whole domain? You never know.

• qa.org currently looks like a crappy ad honeypot and might be up for sale - for how much, I have no idea of course.

• se.org seems to belong to a swedish company, but is not in use. See the whois records for details

• questions.org forwards to the site of a Christian ministry, but is not used to host a site or brand.

• stack.org is in use by Tucows as a domain for personalized E-Mail and thus probably out of the question; maybe still worth asking

• www.com is probably too expensive, but you'll never know until you ask: They're showing crappy ads right now. cooking.www.com is memorable and unique. It will confuse normal users, though, who are used to putting www. in front - some clever marketing ruse would have to make this a feature rather than a bug.

• exchange.org might be for sale - it features a Sedo parking page. Would make a nice umbrella brand for the network, nicer than "stackexchange" anyway. This is my favourite so far: It makes sense (a busy place that connects people), it is easy to memorize, the .org TLD underlines the open, community-oriented character, and it also works over the phone: cooking dot exchange dot org will work even for our moms.

• ex.com is a crappy parking page.

• Find some other short, related domain name that can be purchased

I realize these are options that would strain the budget, but it would be a one-time hassle instead of dozens of fruitless sales negotiations.

I'm sure there is some short and sweet domain name that can be used for this that is better than stackexchange.com that the community may be able to settle on. The main advantage - not having to go through dozens of sales negotiations for expensive domains - might make it worth it.

Answer 18

So a piece of this argument is more on the hypothetical level:
topic.stackexchange.com vs awesomeurl.com
and related stuff (corporate branding, the For Dummies analogy, etc.)

But in the case of NothingToInstall.com, it sounds like that's not the primary issue:

I guess the root issue then, is that these names are so bad. pauseforhelp.com -- awful. nothingtoinstall.com? terrible. Cooking is the only site that came up with something decent, across ALL the sites that are attempting to name themselves (seasonedadvice). Why would we trade one OK-ish name (stackexchange.com) with a clear meaning (webapps, gaming, cooking) for ~25 even worse names, where it's unclear what they even mean? Naming: not only does it not scale, it makes everything WORSE

and

Bottom line, nothingtoinstall.com was a very, very bad name and materially worse than webapps.stackexchange.com. Even worse, every other proposed name in the network (except cooking) is various shades of "we hate it a tiny bit less than the other suggestions."

(Jeff Atwood, in comments on other posts on this page).

I'm not saying I necessarily disagree, but I'm interested to hear other opinions: are these names really that bad? Are they too long? To ambiguous? What?

So we can really see them in the same place, I went through the other public beta meta sites to pull out their leading site name candidates. (I deliberately removed all camel-casing, just to see how the names looked at first glance):

• gaming.stackoverflow.com vs pauseforhelp.com
• programmers.stackoverflow.com vs outofscope.com
• answers.onstartups.com (keeping SE 1.0 site branding and URL)
• webapps.stackoverflow.com vs nothingtoinstall.com
• cooking.stackoverflow.com vs seasonedadvice.com
• math.stackexchange.com vs mathexchange.com (2nd place was HilbertsHotel.com??)
• ubuntu.stackexchange.com vs ask.ubuntu.com or askubuntu.com
• gamedev.stackexchange.com vs beyondpolygons.com
• webmasters.stackexchange.com vs webmasteranswers.com
• tex.stackexchange.com vs texnique.com
• electronics.stackexchange.com vs chiphacker.com (which was its SE 1.0 name)
• cstheory.stackexchange.com vs cstheory.org
• unix.stackexchange.com vs kernelpanic.com
• stats.stackexchange.com vs confidenceregion.com
• photo.stackexchange.com vs depthoffield.com
• money.stackexchange.com vs basicallymoney.com (the SE 1.0 name)
• english.stackexchange.com vs lexicalia.com
• apple.stackexchange.com vs askdifferent.com
• ui.stackexchange.com vs happyuser.com
• wordpress.stackexchange.com vs queryposts.com
• gis.stackexchange.com vs invalidgeometry.com
• rpg.stackexchange.com vs askthetable.com or stackofdice.com (tie)
• android.stackexchange.com vs androidexchange.org (.com and .net unavailable)
• diy.stackexchange.com vs twicemeasured.com
• bicycles.stackexchange.com vs cyclequery.com

Are these really that horrible? Why? What's your objective measure of a good vs bad domain name?

Answer 19

Regardless of whether subdomains of stackexchange.com or individual domain names are used, I think http://stackexchange.com needs to become a landing page that promotes and identifies the various sites and the subjects they cover, with the question sampler taking a secondary role.

I do think there should be something that ties the sites together. I think the Stack Exchange widget at the top left plus the footer information is a good way to do that.

Ultimately, I lean toward the individual domain approach, but I don't want that to overshadow the point I'm making in the first paragraph.

Edit:

Right now, stackexchange.com features a mixed sampling of questions sorted by "hotness". There's a sidebar with a bare list of site names (with a short description in a tooltip). I'm proposing that the sites should be what is the featured element on the page with a logo and full description directly visible. A small sampling (two or three) questions could be featured under each site so they're organized by topic. The sites themselves could be organized by more general groupings (e.g. Computers, Personal, etc.). Doing this will build brand identity.

Mockup:

Site Name 1
Site Description - Lorem ipsum ...
Popular tags - [tag1] [tag2] ... [tagN]
Sample Question 1
Sample Question 2
Featured User - Featured User Quote or Fun Fact

Site Name 2
. . .

Answer 20

Why not have something of a mixture of what WillfulWizard and Brian R. Bondy proposed, .

We keep the webapps.se.com domain (I have to agree with Jeff here, NTI just sucks), but when you come to the page instead of seeing a big "Web Apps" name ( I agree with Lord Torgamus, it kind of sucks to go to a page and not have a name but a "section", sort of the going to facebook and seeing "friends" example), we see some sort of tagline, phrase or name, something that is free of the finding a domain restrictions (available, price, etc).

I guess that way the community can feel like they have an identity, and business wise, the page will still be a full *.stackexchange.com page. Plus, I think that that would make it a lot easier for when/if the page "graduates" to a ServerFault size and gets its own domain (it could be similar to the tagline, since exact domain name would be hard to find.. although if the page is as big SO, SF or SU, then that alone may justify expending big bucks on buying "ThePage'sTagLine".com

Answer 21

This probably won't get read much, but just another point to throw into the blender:

This makes it really hard to justify promoting places like Homebrew.Stackexchange over existing StackExchange 1.0 sites like BrewAdvice.com.

Answer 22

As it is now, SE is excellent. It provides a place and format to create a community that is self-regulated. Taking away the ability to name ourselves seems counter-intuitive to the idea of these sites being user-driven.

I feel quite strongly that this decision should be dealt with in a much more democratic manner.

Answer 23

This question is about domain name selection and I sense that the decision has already been made on that front. I don't know very much about search engines and domain names, but the arguments made on that point seem persuasive. In the end, the staff of Stack Overflow Internet Services must do what is the best interests of the whole network.

However, it occurred to me that maybe the topic that should be discussed is not the "domain name" but rather just the site name. Is there a possibility that the site name and the domain name don't need to be an exact match?

In the current context, this is already the case: the site name spells "applications" in full but the domain does not; maybe the name in the banner could just be "Web Apps". Looking more widely at the other beta sites, I see there are some beta sites with rather long names that might be better off with a more succinct choice (even if it's isn't something clever like Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User).

And, it seems like a waste for "Food and Cooking" to not end up being called Seasoned Advice (regardless of what the domain name actually is).

Answer 24

I totally agree with the second point. Having Stackexchange in the domain name would be a plus, because a possible user that find a result in Google Search knowns immediatly what to expect if he/she clicks the link: high quality answers.

Answer 25

Can we have our cake and eat it too?

I know this will sound weird coming from someone who's primary account is on the nameless gaming but...

Could we go with something like this for the network:

nothingtoinstall.stackexchange.com

Nothing To Install

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Q&A for power users of web applications

And of course, have both webapps.stackexchange.com and www.nothingtoinsta.com redirect there.

I believe this would let everyone get to the site by whatever address, whatever identity, they best remember/understand. And you'd be recognizing that the Stack Exchange network is a network of individual communities, but still a network.

And for those communities that have not settled on a name, let them stay at topic.stackexchanged.com, until such time that they come up with a name, if they ever do.

Would the communities accept this? Would this work for the brand?

Answer 26

_{The following is my personal opinion talking about point 1. not point 2 or 3.}

_{If person X from SO Team chimes on the naming of the site during the beta period where all the experimentation and discussion really occurred,to me it is understood that this was the position moving forward.}

_{Domain names were reserved.
I guess I was mistaken. I understand the google ranking point but I really thought you (the SO team) took the sacrifice of the ranking when this question was created and progressed.}

---

The change has already taken place I do not see the need for take backs. Sure some people say the name is horrible. That is great for them. It is just a name. A name and service cannot be linked like that. If the service is good the name becomes just something to call it.

In terms of length... well it is shorter, a very minor plus.

meta.webapps.stackexchange.com
webapps.stackexchange.com
meta.nothingtoinstall.com
nothingtoinstall.com

_{The community ... those who actually participate, voiced their concerns when the time came. Why should someone over at SO or news.ycombinator or anywhere for that matter says what they think it should be when they have not even participated in the discussion when the time came ? If they had something to say it should have been said up to 85 days ago when we started at Public Beta.}

_{Maybe have all big references to webapps.stackexchange.com updated to nothingtoinstall e.g.}

• joelonsoftware.com
• codinghorror.com
  

Well the domain has been reverted to webapps.stackexchange so yeah I am not sure what to say.

I also see users quoting Guy Y only to be countered by the same Guy words at a next time. I do not hold any benefits from the stack overflow internet services, inc. This is a business decision that I really thought was made months ago, I am just an ordinary person helping a community. I hope this can be resolved promptly.

Also now that is reverted would it not look unstable if we even agreed to go back to nothingtoinstall ?

I cannot say for other stackexchange communities because I think they have different dynamics. It seems this has turned into a network wide stackexchange discussion so they are here to have their say.