Design Blog

I will go with realdesigntutorials.com or terrystutorials.com looks great to me. By the way wish you good luck with your new venture.

I like the one's that say help-for-designers.com & help said the designer.com just on the right side of informal and arty.They make me laugh and would entice me to your site.

I would'nt use the names devs design it reminds me too much of deviant art name. That's just my personal opinion, you don't want to be confused with them, also you have to be careful of copyright issues. People can get a bit funny if they think your name sounds or looks too much like theirs (legally speaking).

OK, here is some feedback on a couple of ideas in your plan.

"I will be using an alias for this site." Why? If you plan to grow this business and nurture a list of devoted customers, what's the benefit of hiding behind an alias? Most all of the successful marketers that I know have built businesses being honest, real, and personal with their customers. I think you'll find most people appreciate up-front, personable business owners. If you aren't honest about who you are, people will suspect you aren't honest in what your teach and sell.

"I won't monitise the site for a year or so after its inception." Why? What do you have to gain by waiting. All you'll be doing is training your prospects that everything on your site is free. Waiting until you have everything perfect is not the best way to proceed. After six months of hard work you'll probably feel like quitting due to lack of return. Start small and focused, but don't worry that your site is limited in its offerings. Your prospects will understand as you regularly come out with new content.

Domain names. Pick something short, memorable, easily spelled, brandable, always stick with dot com, no hyphens, no numbers, no confusion. Leave your name out of it. Someday you may want to sell the business and no one is going to want to have your name as part of the baggage of the previous owner.

On the focus of what you're doing. This is just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth. There are tons of tutorial sites showing how to use software. Places like Lynda.com and others focus on the "how to" of that aspect of design. I think you are limiting your business because a customer is only going to buy tutorials on the software that he has. So you're going to get a lot of one-and-done sales. Most of the money in IM comes from back end sales, i.e. multiple sales to a happy customer.

If I were doing this, I would focus on design, not the software of design. Great designers can use any of a number of software programs to create their designs. What's missing in the marketplace is all the various aspects of what makes a great design from layout, to typography, to spatial relationships, to color, and all the rest. Great design doesn't come from software, it comes from great designers that understand the principles of what goes in to a great design. To me, that would be a much more valuable way to monetize this market.

Good luck to you,

Steve

No to the domain names that use hyphens. realdesigntutorials.com is the best one among your list. However, if you can come up with something shorter that can sum up everything you're offering, that'd be better.

something short will work better, i have work on idea similar to yours for pixaroma i made the site where i give free vectors and psd and a youtube channel where i put tutorials also made some groups on facebook to meet more people and tried to make an acount on all important websites like dribbble, behance, twitter, google+ etc. Good luck with the project i hope i can see you soon on youtube or facebook