There's a site on the web at Art.com. What would you expect to find there? The new art auction site for Butterfield & Butterfield? A vanity page for Art Buchwald? A website for helicopter supplier Advanced Rotorcraft Technology?

Until a few months ago, the last answer was correct. What a waste. But ART registered the domain name in 1992, before the web made the internet an important thing. So along comes a company that sells prints, posters, limited edition lithographs, pictureframes and framing services. It was bootstrapped and almost went broke at one point, under the really ugly name of Artuframe.com. Besides that, it had its headquarters on neither the right nor left coasts, but in the unlikely technology center of Lake Forest, Illinois.

It wasn't even the first such site on the web. The closest competitors seem to be Barewalls.com (Barewalls Interactive Art LLC of Cambridge, Massachussets) and Artselect.com (ArtSelect of Fairfield, lowa), which offer equivalent services to the site formerly known as Artuframe.com. Artuframe was founded in late 1997, while Barewalls.com hit the Net a year or so earlier. None of the competitors had an intuitive name, but one would vote for Artuframe as clearly having the worst.

Of course, all three companies want to be the Amazon.com of the art print world. Yeah, well, we all want to be the Amazon.com of something. But how do you actually become so successful that you can turn the name of a South American river into one of the mostrecognized brand names around? Especially when you have a three-way race, not a clear early leader?Well, Artuframe founder and CEO William A Lederer decided the answer was money. He raised several million dollars from Benchmark Capital, Softbank Technology Ventures and Sandler Capital Management. It allowed Lederer to continue meeting his payroll commitments and gave him some money to do some name buying.

He finally decided it was time to call those helicopter folks and tell them it was their lucky day. Now, the helicopter guys hated the URL anyway, because most people who randomly type in "art.com" do not expect to find helicopter parts. The Webmaster had to deal with a lot of misdirected traffic.

But the fact that people were typing in that URL on a hunch demonstrated that it had value. Lederer had to negotiate down as much as he could. In the end, he paid $450,000 of his VCs' money just to get the name. He feels lucky his board didn't fire him. "They were not happy about it," he says, smiling.Did itwork? His competitors, of course, argue against domain names as a critical element to success. "In any product category, the dominant player never has a generic name. You don't hear much about books.com or music.com," says Barewalls co-CEO Daniel Spira. Adds the other Barewalls CEO, Lorne Lieberman, "we believe one of the greatest assets is the follow through and execution."

They are right. The best name in the world won't help you if you do not execute well. But if it's a close game, it has to make a difference. In fact, the day Lederman switched his domain name to "art.com," traffic doubled. Before the switch, he had about 50,000 unique visits per month. Now, several months later, he has 450,000 unique visits per month. Lederer says traffic is growing at about 60 per cent per month, and he expects 1 million unique visits per month by the end of June. He says he has about 30,000 custom, so you might say he has paid at $15 per customer in buying Art.com domain name. That's a much better deal than Microsoftgot when it bought Web TV.

At that traffic level, Art.com is now at about the same size as Barewalls.com, which is still a bootstrapped operation. Barewalls.com claims about 500,000 unique visits per month. But rest assured that the name makes a difference. Even Barewalls.com co-CEO Spira admits, "this name is a very big improvement for them."

Execution will still win the battle. But let's face it. Which name are you most likely to remember tomorrow when you decide to order a print for mom for Mother's Day? Corbis?

-- www.upside.com