When I first decided to embark on the shareware game venture, the first order of business was to come up with a company name. I knew the company would need a website so in choosing the company name, I also checked out the availability of the matching domain name. I ruled out several desireable company names as the website domains were already spoken for.

I finally settled on Gypsy King Software intending to use gypsyking.com as the domain. At the time, I was using a free web host and built the website on their domain. Being short on cash, I delayed registering the domain. Little did I know that domain wars were raging all across the internet and a couple months after I formed the company, someone else snapped up my domain.

I’ve watched that domain for more than ten years and they’ve never built a real website on it. They simply bought it to squat on it in the hopes of a big sale later. They won’t be getting that big sale from me.

Once I was ready to register a domain, I had to come up with a new domain choice. Did I go for gypsyking with a .net or .biz or some other variance? As most folks expect websites to be .coms I decided not to go for a variance, but instead choose a different domain name.

The trouble was that I couldn’t settle on a new name. I brainstormed and came up with a long list of possibilities, finally narrowing it down to five. I couldn’t get past those five. I kid you not, I simply got stuck there so I registered all five.

I don’t remember what they all were except that I eventually let three of them go. I think one was gypsygames, another may have been gypsykingsoftware or something similar. As I was working on some non-game software at the time, gypsygames didn’t fit so it went by the wayside. Gypsykingsoftware was simply too long. I was worried that gipsyking would be harder for people to remember with the odd spelling of gipsy with an “i” so I finally built the website on gypsyware.com.

As gipsyking is virtually the same as the company name Gypsy King, I decided to keep the domain but for all these years it simply pointed you to gypsyware. Eventually I decided that the website was simply going to waste so I built a brand new website at gipsyking to mirror the gypsyware website, and now there are the two websites.

It was exciting because it gave me the chance to give Gypsy King Software a facelift via the new website. I plan to give gypsyware a facelift someday but it will be a complicated task as the changes I plan to make will be major and I need to have a big block of time to redo the website all at once so that it suffers no disruption. So many projects, so little time!

The moral of this story is that if you are thinking about registering a domain and it would be BAD if you didn’t get it, you better get it NOW. I don’t know if it’s true but I’ve heard that simply looking up a domain can put it on the squatter’s radar.

You could even say that this story has a secondary moral: Don’t procrastinate! Whatever you’re putting off, just Git ‘er Done!