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What’s in a name? How Healio got its groove on
During a recent job interview, the candidate complimented us for selecting Healio as the name of our web platform.
“I get it,” he said, “I can feel the references and its roots.”
I laughed. Not everyone reacted that way in 2012 when we launched Healio.com. Nor do too many people know that the site we were building was MedicalMatrix.com until 3 months before launch. More on that in a minute.
What’s in a name?
Selecting your website name and URL feels very much like naming your child. The pressure and anxiety mount as the date draws nearer and you are acutely aware that you only get one chance to get it right. You fret over it, pray over it, whisper possibilities to those you love and audition an endless list of options. You hope that in the end, your choice will bring great joy to all who are touched by it. Our naming criteria had to be rigorous.
Website naming criteria
- Short and memorable. Ideally 8 characters or less.
- Appropriate. Would it resonate with our audience? Does it relate well to our content and audience?
- Available and secure. We had to be certain we could secure both the trademark, the URL and its variants.
- Mostly unique. Go ahead and cringe, editors. You try Googling something that returns only one result.
- Built for the long haul. Just like that baby name, somebody is going to have to live with it every day for a long, long time.
Medical Matrix. Where is it now?
Medical Matrix was a name already trademarked to The Wyanoke Group. It was an early internet pioneer with a great concept. The editors peer-reviewed and ranked websites so physicians would know which were credible and which to avoid. But it never quite took off. So, we had this kind of cool name hanging around we wanted to reuse.
Except we did not own the URL, and could not find the owner. After months of futile searching, Mark Ellison, our SEO guy, finally tracked it down to a woman in New Mexico. Her late husband secured the URL but never launched a site attached to it. She thought she might one day and was reluctant to part with it. After our first conversation, she agreed to consider selling it – after she returned from a month-long wilderness trip to the desert. Ultimately, we never closed the deal.
The search begins
Meanwhile, a small group of us started the search for an alternate. I spent a lot of couch hours on nights and weekends punching characters into GoDaddy, Googling results to see what band, porn site or biker club had a similar name and generating lists of available options. We’d send our favorites to each other to see if anything resonated. I stared at the list of contenders hanging on my wall every day. We each had our favorite, but we quickly came to consensus – we pretty much hated them all.
All the while the countdown clock was running. One day, Peter Slack said, “what was that funny sounding one? At least it was short?” I ran to my office and grabbed the list. Healio, of course, was the one he meant.
It was short – six letters. And memorable. It referenced Helios – the god of the sun in Greek mythology – and had connotations of health and healing. Best of all, it was available and secure, and did not appear to be associated with any porn, although there was a band.
Most frequent response to Healio in 2012
- What is Healio?
- Hello to you to.
- How do you spell that?
- I did not know SLACK had been acquired!
After internal testing and a small survey of some editorial board members, we signed the birth certificate. Healio was born. The most frequent response to the name was, “What is Healio?” We heard that less and less after about a year. Today, as our traffic and engaged and active users continue to grow, we are more likely to hear, “Oh, I love Healio!” It makes us proud to see what our baby has become. And she’s just getting started.
- John C. Carter
Chief Operating Officer, The Wyanoke Group
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-c-carter-a42aba11/
Twitter: @JohnCCarter
Disclosure: Carter is Chief Operating Officer of The Wyanoke Group®. Healio®, Healio® Strategic Solutions, Healio® Live and SLACK® Incorporated are wholly owned subsidiaries of The Wyanoke Group®. He has been a SLACK® Incorporated or Wyanoke Group employee since 1982. Along the way he has worked as editor, writer, marketer, product and project developer and manager.