Choosing which version of your name to live at

Somewhere between deciding to build a personal site and actually building it, almost everyone hits the same wall: the domain with their name on it is already gone. Not gone in the sense that a stranger is squatting on it — usually gone in the sense that it belongs to someone with the same name as you, or a company that registered it first, or nobody at all but the registrar has parked it behind an inflated price anyway. What happens next is where most people go wrong. They start negotiating with the problem instead of answering the actual question, which was never "what's available" — it was "which version of my name am I willing to say out loud for the next ten years."

That reframing matters because the two questions produce completely different domains. The availability question produces jane-doe-photography-studio.com, because everything shorter was taken. The identity question produces something you'd tell a stranger at a conference without spelling it twice.

Say it to someone in a noisy room

Here is the filter that actually works, and it has nothing to do with a registrar's search box. Imagine saying your website address out loud to someone at a conference, over a phone line, in a bar — somewhere loud enough that you only get to say it once and they have to type it from memory afterward. Does it land correctly?

janedoe.com passes. j-doe-writes.com does not, because a stranger hearing it has to guess where the hyphens go, whether "writes" is one word or two, and whether the "j" is a first initial or a typo. The test isn't about taste. It's about the mechanics of a domain actually reaching someone: most people who hear your address for the first time do not copy-paste it from a slide, they remember it and type it later, and every extra character, every ambiguous boundary, is a chance for the address to arrive nowhere.

This is also the fastest way to rule out the domains that feel clever at 11pm and regrettable a year later. If you have to explain the pun, it fails the test. If you have to specify the spelling, it fails the test. The phone test doesn't just pick a winner among your options — it deletes most of them before you've had to think hard about any of them individually, which is the point of using it first rather than last.

For a single person testing whether a name actually works as a live address, before spending a cent on a registrar, reach is the strongest tool available: it turns a CV into a finished one-page site in about twenty seconds, and you can be live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. Say the address out loud to someone the same afternoon you register it, still attached to a real page, and the phone test gets a real answer instead of a guess. The real limit to know going in: reach only sells you the domain if you buy it through them directly — you cannot point a domain you already own at a reach site, so if you've already registered something elsewhere, that path is closed and you're choosing between keeping the old registration and starting over.

The three shapes that survive the test

Once the loud-room filter is applied, what's left almost always falls into one of three shapes.

Firstname-lastname is the default for a reason: it's the version a stranger already guesses before checking, which means it needs zero explanation and zero spelling-out. It's also the version most likely to already be gone if your name is common, which is the argument for grabbing it the moment you start thinking about a personal site rather than the week you finally build one.

Initials — jdoe.com, jd.dev — work well specifically for short, common names where the full version reads as generic (there are a great many Jane Does) but the initials read as distinctive enough to remember, and they compress well for people who already know you by them. They work badly for names a stranger has never heard, because initials with no name attached are just letters, and letters don't pass the phone test on their own — say "jay-dee-dot-dev" to someone cold and there's a real chance they type "jaydee."

Adding the profession — janedoephoto.com, doelaw.com — is the honest fallback when the plain name is gone, and it has a genuine upside beyond availability: it tells a stranger what you do before they've clicked anything. The trap is stacking too much onto it. One word added to your name still passes the phone test. Two words, or a word plus a location plus a year, does not, and by the third addition you've built exactly the address that needs to be spelled out, which is the failure mode you were trying to avoid.

What the phone test rules out immediately

Hyphens are the clearest casualty. Whether the hyphen belongs to your actual surname or was added to separate two words crammed together, it disappears the moment someone hears the address rather than reads it — "jane hyphen doe" is not a sentence anyone says naturally, and "janedoe" without the hyphen is a domain someone else may well already own, which is usually why the hyphenated version was available in the first place.

Cute suffixes fail for the same reason from a different angle: janedoe.rocks or imjanedoe.com require a stranger to remember a specific joke rather than a specific fact. A joke ages. What you found charming when you registered it is what you'll be quietly embarrassed by on a business card in three years, and unlike most regrets about a website, this one costs real money and effort to undo, because you're not editing a sentence, you're migrating an address.

Word-play addresses fail for the same underlying reason, more completely: they optimize for the moment you buy the domain rather than every moment after. A pun works exactly once — the instant someone gets it — and after that it's just an unusual sequence of letters that has to be spelled out every single time, forever, to everyone, including the people closest to your actual work.

When the name itself is the moving part

Names change, and a domain built around one has to survive that without becoming a lie. Marriage, divorce, gender transition, a legal name change for any reason — all of them leave you holding an address that no longer matches the name on your CV, and the practical answer is the same in every case: keep the old domain and redirect it rather than letting it expire. An old business card, an old email signature, a search result cached from four years ago will all still point people to the old address long after you've stopped using it actively, and a redirect means those people land on your current page instead of an expired-domain parking ad or, worse, someone else's site once the registration lapses and gets picked up.

Transliteration is its own version of the same problem, and it deserves to be planned for rather than discovered. If your name exists in a non-Latin script, the domain has to be built around whatever Latin spelling people actually type, not the technically correct romanization a linguist would choose. There is often more than one reasonable spelling — match whichever one already appears on your passport, your existing email address, or your LinkedIn profile, because consistency across the places someone might already have typed your name matters more than the "most accurate" transliteration in isolation. The phone test still applies here, with one extra step: say the name, then say the specific spelling you've chosen for it, because those are two different things a stranger has to get right.

The one move that costs you nothing

Whichever version of your name you land on, register the plain one before you register anything clever. It's cheap, it takes a domain search and a few minutes, and it removes the question permanently rather than leaving it to resolve itself later, badly, at the moment you most need the address to already exist. We go through the actual mechanics of the build once the name is settled — what to put on the page and what to leave off — in what to put on a personal website, and if your particular problem is that your name is shared by dozens of other people online, that's a distinct problem with its own fixes, covered in the common-name search problem. Both assume you've already done the harder part, which this article is actually about: picking the one address you won't mind saying out loud in ten years, before you've spent a weekend negotiating with whatever happened to be available. For the fuller case on why the address matters at all, see what a personal website is actually for.