I have wrote an small aritcle on picking a domain for newcomers, there are some tools that can come in handy for any webmaster. All these tips come from my experience with domains. http://www.dragonfreebies.com/domains/you-and-your-domain Please give feedback, comment and subscribe for more helpful articles. I will be doing more traffic generation tips soon.
Disagree. A non hyphenated domain name is better but if it isn't available hyphens are perfectly acceptable. Much better to have a hyphenated name that clearly reflects what the site is about than to have a non hyphenated name that isn't very clear. I did quite a bit of research before I took pet-snakes.com (as opposed to trying to buy petsnakes.com from the owner) and found the hyphen wasn't going to cause much of an issue. In terms of it being memorable I've found it much more productive to say "pet dash snakes dot com" than "pet hyphen snakes dot com" people process the dash faster for some reason.
The article is small and yes you have stated the viewers that avoid hypens in the domain name. That's the wrong thing friend when there a value,hypen plays an important role. - remember You must have stated as follows - "if you don't have an alternative then you may choose hyphen"