Its hard enough thinking up a clever, original and catchy company name. Its made infinitely more difficult by then having to see whether the domain name is available.

The process of coming up with my company name (which is, of course, still under wraps for now!) was an arduous and frustrating experience. I came up with so many gems that shone with brilliance and wit, only to be devastated to find that the domain name was not available. And it would have been fine if I saw some other little company had snapped it up and was doing imaginative and useful things with the domain, but my blood erupted with anger to find that 90% of the domains I wanted were parked and available for sale. When I dared to enquire what they wanted for the honour of using a domain that was lying dormant, they responded with US$10,000! Now, I am sure that would be open to negotiation, but considering my budget for the entire design, development and publicity of my whole site is close to that amount, its close to criminal to request that something that should cost US$10 should cost several orders of magnitude more. I’m all for entrepreneurship and supply/demand, but this trend which seems to be ballooning out of control is affecting the people that need the most assistance, those little people with big dreams who want to have a crack at making something fun and special online. And these sharks are holding domains up for ransom, turning a commodity into a rare jewel.

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In designing my soon-to-be-released web application, I pondered for a while over what colour background to use. A trivial concern you may think, but I am aware of the potential it has to affect the way your site is perceived.

My obvious initial assumption was that I would go for a white background. When aiming for simplicity and elegance, the white-backgrounded site seems to be ubiquitous. See Google, MyBlogLog, Riffs, YouTube, Amazon, etc.

Alternatively, there are sites using coloured backgrounds effectively: The Best Stuff in the World, Lingr, Joopz etc.

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I thought this article interesting after my earlier discussion on negotiating contracts:

Web design contracts: Why Bother?

What I particularly liked was the proposition that besides being a legal document (which almost certainly you will never exercise legally), a contract fulfills a socio-psychological function, by forcing all parties to think about the agreement they are about to enter. Specifically, “the solemnity involved in the act of signing a contract—the ritual of the contract negotiation and execution itself—impresses on the parties that they are making a commitment to each other, and that the document they are signing describes that commitment.”

Admitedly this process is somewhat less solemn when it being conducted in different countries, and document you are signing is a scanned and emailed and then printed version of the contract… but the essence is still there.

Once the price and scope of works was finalised between myself and my supplier, it was time to finalise and sign the contract.

This process generally involves lawyers and long documents and much to-ing and fro-ing, but we are a small company, and my supplier is as well. There were no lawyers involved on my side, and the contract that the supplier proposed was only 3 pages long. However, we were able to pool together other contract and non-disclosure agreement templates from other software development projects we had done in the past, and just decided to use common sense in compiling a reasonable contract. We realised early on that with our budget, and the suppliers Eastern European location, the likelihood of us ever mounting a legal challenge on any point, and of a resolution ever being achieved through legal means, was negligible. The costs of such a process were prohibitive, and the discrepancies between the legal systems in both countries was too difficult to contemplate.

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