I just got married and while our love has never been a question, post-marital naming convention caused us to consider several options. My bread and butter is my online presence and I didn’t consider this when a man made a lifelong commitment to marry me. I was just pumped he was cute and proposed in real life.

Then I realized it’s even tough competition for wedding domains. For example, DanaandMatt.com are getting married near Philly, they like Flash animation and Dave Matthews Band. MattandDana.com got married in September 2010 and honeymooned in Italy despite the fact that their site says they’ve been “Rocking Out Since 2004.” Moh. We’ve only been rocking out since 2005. Domain disaster.
The naming options we considered include:

• The Traditional: The top Dana Crockers in Google Search are the transportation captain on the set of Iron Man and a Portland-based RE/MAX agent. While this isn’t the steepest competition, we wanted to point to my previous work and keep a sense of my cultural identity.
• The Portmanteau: The combination of both our names as a new and undiscovered word (Croshiro - definitely NOT Oshocker) would allow me to stay high in search engines; however, it would’ve also made my shy hubby far more discoverable.
• The Phase Out: My friend Sharon recently got married and started calling herself Sharon Senser McKellar in all online profiles. Her plan is to phase out Senser when McKellar is strong enough to stand on its own in search engines. We thought about it, but we’ve got really long names.
• Keeping our Names This is what we’re doing. We’re not doing it because we’re bucking tradition, nor is it because we’re afraid we’ll split up soon. We’re doing it because it’s the most practical thing to do for search and discoverability. I may change my middle name to reflect some of the Crocker connection, but for now I’m going to keep the name I’ve been rocking out since 1978.