Some friends of mine are expecting their first child, whom they know is a boy. Choosing a name, however, has proven a challenge. They are both Web-savvy entrepreneurs who have their hearts set on registering their child's name on the Internet and setting up an online photo journal of his life. Ideally, like any business, the name would be the URL--as a matter of convenience for their friends and relatives. But when their first 20 choices were already taken, they knew they had to get clever.

Such is the dilemma facing any company, new or old, that wants a name with a Web presence.

"These days you need a name that is unique, trademarkable, brandable, and most important, is available in dot.com," says Richard Lau, founder of NamesDirect.com, an online name-registration service. "The problem is, we've run out of actual words."

Lau isn't exaggerating. By most estimates, nearly every word in the English language is registered through InterNIC, the organization that regulates the domain-name system. As of June there were 9,482,427 .com domains registered, with 17,738,857 total worldwide registrations, including .org, .net, and .gov.

If you're looking for a name that is short or that's descriptive of your services, good luck. As of April, all three-letter and three-number combinations are gone. Popular nouns are big business. Auction sites like http://www.afternic.com fetch obscene prices for the rights to common words. As of this writing, the current bid for hiker.com stood at $5,000. Minimum bids for fact.com and photography.com stood at $1 million.

Plus, you have to contend with online marketplaces that have tied up thousands of words and phrases in hopes of selling them off at a nice price. If you want yeah.com, or chicken.com, you'll have to bargain with Digimedia Inc., an Internet publishing and advertising firm headquartered in Terral, Okla.

Nicrosoft.com exists apparently for no other reason than the letter N's proximity to M on the keyboard. Microsoft is, after all, an online giant. Accidentally type a J and, sure enough you get jicrosoft.com, which is owned by Newsfeed.com, a professional Usenet news service. And yes, they'll sell it to you, as well as icrosoft.com and hicrosoft.com.

"That's what makes the name game even more complicated," says Jack Trout, co-author of the seminal marketing book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (Mass Market Paperback). "You have to buy up everything around your name and everything that even sounds like your name, or else somebody can do a guerilla marketing campaign and register something that sounds like you in order to pick up wayward traffic."

Many companies have no alternative but to jump through linguistic hoops to coin non-names, or else contrive some cheeky word combination that somehow conveys the vibe of their business--or, in many cases, sounds nothing like their business. One company needed a word that expressed its skilled use of navigational tools and its ability to visualize complex relationships and move intelligently among them. Its name? Navigent.com.

Onvia.com, formerly MegaDepot, is a B2B office-supply retailer. Computer Literacy Inc. is now fatbrain.com, an online professional book retailer. Goofyguys.com provides free online computer advice.

Syllables for Sale

Many companies are resorting to the quite expensive trend of hiring a Web-naming company that will conceptualize and invent your business moniker. Such corporate-identity firms are popping up everywhere: There's Lexicon, Idiom, Metaphor, NameLab, NameBase, Name/It, Namestormers, and TrueNames, to name a few. Each has its own guarded techniques meant to convey your business essence and conceive those perfect syllables, down to the last phoneme. Through mood boards, focus groups, and identity projects, these marketing mavericks create suffixes for the new economy; names that have a more concrete effect than jargony mission statements ("We maximize integrated synergies and harness front-end mindshares that empower dynamic architectures. We facilitate cross-platform paradigms, leverage sexy vortals and strategize mission-critical eyeballs"). And it will only cost you around $75,000. (And that doesn't include the marketing campaign.)

Trout, for his part, feels these companies will take you for a ride. "I call them modern-day Robin Hoods," he says. "They rob from the rich and keep it for themselves. They charge a ton of money for coming up with a catchy name. It's not that difficult."

One infamous example of a Web-name endeavor gone bad comes from Hewlett-Packard and its efforts last year to name its instrumentation and measurement spin-off division. HP embarked on a five-phase, cross-unit project with the identity firm Landor Associates. After four months of "brand therapy" and intensive focus groups, the process eventually cost HP more than $1 million dollars for their new division's name: Agilent.

"These names are just getting really weird," says Trout. "What the hell is Agilent? How does that say measurement testing devices? And how is it worth $1 million?"

Many companies, however, have had great success rebranding themselves through a marketing firm. The former MiningCo.com, already on its second name, decided it needed a name that was less clunky and limiting and would convey its niche as an online-everything site. The company hired New York marketing firm FrankfurtBalkind to assist in the name change to About.com. "The way we went about it was to find out strategically what they're trying to do," says Aubrey Balkind, CEO of FrankfurtBalkind, "to get at their vision, understand their brand, and find that one word that epitomizes the whole package."

About.com subsequently bought more than 4,000 domain names in an effort to control the About.com name. According to Balkind, in less than two months the company moved to the ninth most visited site on the Web, up from 25th.

Just Do It Yourself

Like Trout, Richard Lau feels that coining a unique business name needn't be the exorbitant procedure companies put themselves through. After a little in-house brainstorming, his team recently came up with the name Anesa, a company that provides customer service to existing Web sites--and it didn't cost him a dime. The first step they took was to lay down some ground rules that Lau recommends to anyone who needs to brand a name:

Before you incorporate, before you order any checks, open a bank account, or tend to a business plan, it is paramount that your domain name is available in .com. Several online services will confirm or deny your name http://www.register.com, http://www.namesdirect.com. If possible, nab a name that starts with A, B, or C and is five letters or shorter. Lau says this will help position your site higher up in the search engines and directories. And there's something to be said for names that are easy to type and pronounce. Once you've registered the .com version, don't stop there. Secure the .net and .org versions as well. When Lau and his team settled on Anesa, all three domains were available, but they made the mistake of waiting a week to buy the .org. By then, it was gone. If you're lucky enough to get the .com name you want, the next obstacle is to purchase a trademark.

According to Lau, the number of trademarks registered through the U.S. Patent and Trademark office has gone up nearly 300 percent in the last six months. Trademarking a name in the United States costs approximately $400 for an application and then $50-$1,500 in lawyers' fees to help you fill out the paperwork.

But Lau's service at http://www.yourtrademarks.com and its relationship with http://www.websitetrademarks.com offers a free search for trademark availability and a $52 paperwork fee.

Beware: It is common to secure a trademark, only to find that the domain is already taken. In fact, most trademarked terms are registered as domain names already, but by different people. Says Lau: "This is not necessarily a deliberate thing; with 15 million domain names out there, it is inevitable that in the rush to register an available name the registrant doesn't do a trademark search first. Also, many trademark owners don't enforce their trademark, so some domain owners don't care."

Finally, as a means to avoid any derisive mudslinging from your competitors, it's prudent to register ihate.com and sucks.com versions of your site. "[The names] ihatebmw.com and ihatecadillac were just registered through us by disgruntled consumers," says Lau. AOLsucks.org is one of the most visited anti-companies on the Web.

No matter how esoteric or generic your business name turns out, the bottom line is the brand you build around it. "When I first saw Onvia, I laughed," says Lau. "But when they used to be called MegaDepot, I could never remember it. Now, when I see Onvia, I know it."

As for my friends, the expecting couple, they finally settled on their child's name: Nickolai--after the mother's Russian grandfather. Alas, http://www.nickolai.com was taken by a sporting-goods store in Green Bay, Wis. Undaunted, they kept Nickolai as a name, and in about four months, you can see his baby pictures at http://www.nickoleye.com.

Jeff Barbian is associate editor of ComputerUser.

A Name Is Only the Beginning

Let's assume you or your crack team of marketers have settled on the perfect name for your company. More important, let's also assume that your name is phonetically obscure enough to still be available as a domain address and is trademarkable. Aside from hiring a team of artists to design your name into a flashy, catchy swoosh or swirl, your next steps should include a Web marketing strategy that aims to position your site for optimal visibility and accessibility.

The following is a condensed version of Wilson Internet's "Web Marketing Checklist" of relatively easy measures that will direct traffic into your online environment. Access the complete checklist http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm. Write an enticing title page to appear in the prominent search engines. Keep it compact--five to eight words--and as expressive as possible, since this is what appears in hypertext. List key words and phrases that you think people might type in a general search that would lead them to your site, and place those words at the top of the Web page. Consider using both lowercase and uppercase versions of your most important words. Write a page description using at least 20 significant keywords. The description should be a concise 200- to 250-character sentence and devoid of filler or throwaway words. Submit the page to such important search engines as AltaVista, Metacrawler, Excite, WebCrawler, Lycos, Northern Light, and the top directory, Yahoo. Most of these engines will robotically "spider," or index, your site. A submission service is the way to go here. Try Submit-It http://www.submitit. linkexchange.com or All4one Submission Machine http://www.all4one.com/all4submit. Market the URL on stationery, business cards, corporate literature, and such traditional media as classified ads, direct mail, and even commercials. This is an important way to cement your URL in consumers' minds, and is often cheaper and more effective than spotty online advertising.

-J.B.