A New Domain: Readable.io

When I first launched Readability-Score.com, many years ago, I picked a domain name which described exactly what the site actually did. It measured the readability of text - nothing more, nothing less.

But that was then. And things change. The site now offers much, much more. The core offering is still readability scoring, but it's paired with highlighting of issues, URL and File processing, and an API. It's not as simple as it once was.

And worse than that, it's become clear that our domain is, ironically, not very readable. It's got a hyphen, and I didn't buy the unhyphenated version. It's far too long. It's tough to remember. It's tough to type. The more time that passes, the more we become tied to it, and it's a problem we definitely have to solve, eventually.

So, after a few months of preparation, it's time to get on with the scary job of solving that problem. I think it's better to just get it over with and deal with the fallout now, which I'm not reliant on the income from the site and while it's still quite young (since becoming a real product, at least).

So it gives my great pleasure to announce that Readability-Score.com will now be ... readable.io!

I spent some time contacting users and ran some polls, and we had a few nice names to choose from. Ultimately, we chose the simplest name we could find, and the one that represents us best.

The .io name is an unusual one, but well know in techy circles, and due to its high prices it doesn't suffer from the same sort of spammy reputation as .info or .cc names. It's easy to type, easy to remember, and doesn't have any hyphens.

It's going to be a stressful few weeks, as the effect of this change propagates through search engines, but once I'm out the other side it'll be stress well worth enduring.

8 February 2017   |   readable.io