Ask HN: Gut feeling on name change? bug.gd renaming to errorhelp.com
4 comments
bug.gd is too web2.0, since you are selling things to corporations and IT groups, you need to stick to 1.0 names. Errorhelp is leaps and bounds better for your business
Yeah I have to agree. bug.gd is cute but cute mainly sells teddy bears.
Background: We've invested a good bit in the bug.gd name over the past year and a half. We launched that way, with cheerful coverage on Digg, PCWorld, TC, Mashable, random news channels, etc. The press announcement pieces have settled down for now and the lion's share of our traffic is driven by Google and our Firefox extension.
We've begun selling services to corporations and IT groups where the "bug.gd" URL is more of a liability than an attention-getter. We're providing error search engines for help desks and corporate KBs so using a Grenada TLD raises more than a few eyebrows.
We currently use the sites as two different products: bug.gd is our community search engine and ErrorHelp.com focuses on companies. This dual approach makes things more difficult to describe to customers, too.
Questions: What's your gut reaction to the name change? Good idea? What gotchas have you seen when renaming products or services?
From what I understand (and our experiences in the past), the 301 redirects will eventually carry over our decent pagerank, etc. Has anyone had problems with that? Or problems with sitemaps after redirections, etc?
Thanks in advance!