Even though I’ve had my own websites for more than eight years now, I’ve gone through many name changes for my primary site. The most difficult was the one that we just transitioned in March: going from Magic Junk to Somrod Creative.
Magic Junk had built up a pretty fair amount of traffic, but the name itself was not indicative of where we wanted to go with our goals. Additionally, I started the idea for the site long before I met S.Rod. But since she is my partner in all of this, I wanted to make sure the new name included us both.
But Magic Junk had a history with me, so it was hard to let go. I stretched it out much longer than I should have. What I needed, it turned out, was someone who is a well-known business writer to tell me to move on with the site name. So, on a whim, I wrote to Guy Kawasaki (author of The Art of the Start and Rules For Revolutionaries ) and asked him what he thought of Magic Junk. I figured if he saw some good in it, then I would keep it.
To my surprise, on 12/10/06, he actually wrote me back:
Mark,
Honestly, “junk” for me has too many negative connotations. I wouldn’t use it in a name. Thanks for your message.
Guy
That settled it for me. So, after brainstorming over domain names for a few months, and finding many of my favorites were being cybersquatted, I took the name from what S.Rod would often refer to ‘us’ as: Team Sahmrod. Given that half of the people I meet cannot pronounce Sahm correctly, I switched out the ‘ah’ for an ‘o’ (I just made you make funny noises in your head!) and Somrod was born. Sure it took us a year and a half, but we have a lot of fantastic excuses.
So far, I’m really happy we made the name change (other than having to reintroduce traffic), and we still kept MJ around for Magic Junk Radio. Sometimes change is good. Cheers.