01 October 2011 ~ 3 Comments

Oversee Drops Safety Net

Oversee.net recently streamlined 13% of its workforce. Along with pending new hires, will allow the “new” Oversee.net to leverage core assets to innovate more effectively, improve competitive positioning and achieve growth.” Um, sure. I guess now they have less to “oversee”. Domainers wear so many hats, almost every domainer I know is their own Internet company. I’d like to see the actual product flow from an internet company just once with a profit model that reflects a monetary relationship what people are paid.

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30 September 2011 ~ 2 Comments

Domain Parking Industry Shift

DirectI, parent of BigJumbo, DomainAdvertising.com, Logicboxes and ResellerClub (amongst others) announced this week the merge with the DomainAdvertising and BigJumbo brands into a single Domain Parking Platform. The merged entity will function under the brand DomainAdvertising.com. this signals a shift in parking offerings from seller side features to a more customer based approach.

Do you need an entire company to structure a parking offering? Aren’t these generated by scripts? Where does the human factor add value? I have yet to see a compelling content generation model from any parking company, which emphasizes the metrical aspect to website and domain promotion but skips the content angle. This mirrors how I feel the parking industry should be developing. Once the arrogance of a parking company fades away, the utility of their service offering improves.

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21 July 2011 ~ 20 Comments

Administrating the Public Facility Website

A website should serve its customers, educate the public, and form a basis by which clients can decide whether or not to use the services provided. The website for a public facility such structures as a college, university, hospital, government building, or large shopping mall or a business plaza or public bureau block can diffuse frustration and allow the public to navigate their business smoothly. Domainers can spot the opportunity to mount a website such as this when a company fails to do so.

owlgraduateA survey of a company website from internal and external sources can yield surprising results. Factors for consideration should ease of use, correctness of information, updated technology, language, terms and standards, grammar, bilingual options, and feedback or contact opportunities for customers who need help getting to the next step. This information can be amassed by careful research when a domainer obtains a hot domain name property, preferable a short name with direct search engine keyword value that can quickly gain optimized traffic.

The company website for a corporate entity should not necessarily be the public-facing website. The corporate internal site and the company network should not have the same functionality and thus will not serve the public. If administration officials and staff choose to believe their website has a functionality for the existing user base, the existence of a better site made by a outsider can come as a rude awakening. It can also be an embarrassment for management.

Websites that follow a model of corporate jargon company philosophy, and frank inefficacy beg to redone by a domainer or webmaster who can deliver real utility to researcher and site visitors. The architecture of a site should hold enough virtuosity that no copycat will take the time and trouble to reap marginal advantages. But a weak company website begs to exploited by domainers and webmasters capable of making a superior site.

Administrators should capture the opportunity to own their own online presence instead of underdelivering on their website enough to beg an improved site from a non-stakeholder. If the staff do not have the skills to construct a professional looking website, outsourcing should take place. A consultant should be brought in if there is any doubt holes in the current website leave room for an outside to reap a benefit from the company’s own facility and services.

Architecture of a facility website should include a perspective of the physical layout that allows visitors to navigate the premises as well as convey a sense of the organization as a whole. The system map should naturally progress to questions a newcomer would have about how the location or campus interacts with visitors. The TLD .org can be used to promote a information feel for site visitors, although an official disclaimer should be placed somewhere on the site.

The public institution website can also furnish background data on staff and allow outside agencies to research data objects in the proper manner. These can be helpful to print out, or give or send to someone else who may find them of use. Companies who overlook this basic functionality of web publishing are letting their slip show. Every type of public facility should form a committee of persons who can give feedback about the condition of the current website and how it meets the needs of visitors and customers.

What a customer based website should do is allow potential customers and clientele to understand what using your business will entail what it will be like, and what path they should navigate to get the services and products they need. It is a pain point of management if an outsider can deliver this better than the host company.

In every case, people who experience the premises as a daily job or familiar place may not be best suited to understand how the physical layout looks to a stranger.
Customers, visitor, members, or clients need to have an idea of what they are going to be doing. This includes where to go, where to ask questions, where to park, and where to get related services.

Transportation and communication are two elements which can be smoothed over by providing needed information, such as distance from freeway offramps and proximity to bus line stops nearby. other unique data points will present themselves as the site project unfolds.

If a location or campus processes require detailed explanation, directions, coaching, or expansion, this should be done in a bulletin point list, slide show, or even an audio stream which mobile visitors and website readers alike can experience.
An Adobe PDF document ,in an easy to print format, encapsulating the necessary information, makes an excellent addition to any facility or campus website, or a website that aids newcomers and first time visitors to use the physical location the website refers to.

In the year 2011, people are used to referencing the internet before making the trip to any physical campus or premises. They want to know what they will need, what documentation to bring, and what telephone numbers to have or other paperwork/and or materials. A roadmap of how to get to the correct department of office is helpful, especially in a large building. Site administrator, both of physical locations, institutions, and public facilities can grasp the website as a information tool for the next generation.

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12 June 2010 ~ 20 Comments

Choosing a Hosting Account

One of the most critical decisions any domainer will make is the choice of hosting account and the company they decide to have host their domains online. Hosting companies are online service vendors who garner the host records and domain traffic execution to filed HTML content per the domainer or webmaster. Some registrars offer hosting as well.

The hosting account is a must as a transition stage between mere domain names owned via a registrar and live domain sites and managed parked pages. The hosting buy operates to provide every domainer with resources for website development. The cost can vary, and efficiency handling webmaster requests will dictate which hosting company the webmaster chooses.

But not all hosting accounts are created equal. The online  interface and the ease of use is demonstrably better at some hosting companies online than others. Facility for the domain administrator is key when choosing a hosting account. This means the operator should be comfortable logging in regularly and using the password functions to access the domain hosting administration menu.

Not all hosting companies provide this. While the landing page or “top” page has an index of features, these are often created from templates in the case of resellers. Reseller accounts for hosting are “branch” hosting accounts generated by interested users to function as hosting companies themselves. These may have the look and feel of the “parent” hosting company but they do not necessarily have the service benefits.

In some cases, if a reseller chooses to give a domainer a good deal on hosting it is their choice to go with that host. But keep in mind the communication relay and information for technical and customer support will only be as good as the operator of that account. The quality of this can be hard to predict from just a slick hosting company offering template.

Hosting can be available in blocks known as packages. The packages will likely have names corresponding to the their level of service offering.  The “junior” or “baby” web hosting accounts will likely have one name or single tolerance database structures and installations options. These database allowances determine the flexibility of the hosting account. The amount of websites hosted at that address online can vary.

The competition for the domainer’s web hosting dollar has gotten severe and the attractiveness of cost friendly hosting options is different with each hosting offering. Affordability and performance will shake out the best hosting company buy. The thin marginal differences in components inside the hosting offering will be what webmasters and SEO optimizers are shopping for.

Multiple websites can be hosted inside the hosting account purchased for one domain. The key benefit in today’s development market for websites is how many blog installations and portal or forum installations a website hosting account can provide. But there are SEO and ad credits for the advertising side of domaining as well with some hosting packages.

No formal license or minimum coding experience is necessary to buy a hosting account. Price breaks per individual hosting companies exist for quarterly and annual and biannual billing, some on a prepaid basis. Free hosting does exist yet the sites made from such a resource often have ads from the hosting company the user or site owner cannot control.

Owner incorporated accounts directly administrated by the domainer are best. Cost effectiveness and uptime are the optimum qualifications for a web hosting company. Reviews and recommendations should be plentiful. the monetary method of payment should have some protections as well, such as Paypal or via credit card.

Industry domainers can refer the better choices in hosting companies for those domain name owners who don’t want to take a risk.  Some hosting companies actively encourage new commerce and offer discount coupons, like Godaddy.com. Some advantages of one webhost like a free parking option or a unlimited email might matter to one domainer more than another.

Some hosting companies offer sterling references, like HostGator. They will have some good testimonials at the site.  Other web hosting companies specialize in price or online versatility when it comes to variety of open source or Windows based site building applications.

Soon the newb domainer will have experience handling domain name transfers, addressing host records, resolving HTML files with type in traffic, and other hosting tasks. And hosting can always be changes. The best practice is choosing a hosting account is to start making websites for the domains, using a small account,and build from experience.

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24 May 2010 ~ 7 Comments

When Hosting Matters

What matters most in a domain that becomes a website? To a domainer it is easy to state the most important criteria when building a website. The hosting company. Because without the juice, the bandwidth, the psychic and electromagnetic energy driving those page rendering and HTML pages, the viewer has nothing. Without robust hosting, the website disappears. Literally.

Today I watched the finale to LOST on ABC TV. The series finale. That is, I tried to. Six years of mystery enveloped in a solution of two and half hours of television. But ABC must be low on cash, because the streaming LOST video kept stalling. The picture froze a lot. I spent six hours watching about twenty five minutes of fractured “LOST” video. The timelines and independent start sequence operability was nil. I have watched about half of it. By 3 p.m. I gave up.

This stalling and lack of prompt online response is what will fuel a thousand or more rogue LOST video streaming sites for one of the most rewatchable and searchable video episode of television for all time. Any domainer with a video hosting capable hosting account and the ability to embed YouTube or other video format sequences that has a LOST or TV related website up that will snare thousands of page views hourly from around the world.

Many hosting company service levels fluctuate from month to month year to year. But video content is one of the most watchable and linkable data bits a webmaster can add to their blog or website. Video content from “Lost” will be attracting viewers and researchers from search engines around the world for months and years to come. Happy “Lost” domainers will be seeing monster Adsense reports very shortly.

First to market gets the gold. This is still true online. But when faster is measured in milliseconds, hosting speed counts. The entrepreneurs are the ones making fan videos and splicing the video scenes into easily watchable and loadable LOST snippets. Those who invested in ‘Lost” names are reaping huge traffic rewards right about now. Their minimal site design and density of keywords is hitting the best market of LOST fans now than will ever be present anywhere.

The TV and film entertainment scene is a constantly changing domain market. For domainers who have no hosting accounts or less than robust hosting support, their domain related website development looks  grim. When a website has that much resistance to loading, Houston, we have a very big problem. And it’s not just “Lost“. It’s the Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy shows as well. ABC should be known as a tech company and a brand that can get ‘er done.

Not.

I must have seen the “hosted with limited commercials” message about a hundred times. What it should have said was “Shown with limited hosting and best speed to commercials.” A reasonable person might ask, why make a site where video will be hosted that is being shown on the network broadcasting source of that show? The above comments tell the tale. The originating network isn’t interested in supporting the video, just hosting enough bandwidth to load commercials.

Enter the domainer.

Soon the network will move its rotation of live LOST episodes to the back burner, to sell them on DVD. Then the DVD LOST extras market and video clips sites will heat up. Youtube   and the other streaming sites will enjoy that bump in traffic and searchability as well.

That’s the long game of domain site hosting, keeping relative content up with search friendly discoverability for years. When these sites are stacked up inside one hosting account, the profits total real money. Connecting the domains and cutting together the clips makes a film or TV themed website grow. And the visitor fanbase will always have something to say.

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14 May 2010 ~ 35 Comments

Clicks and Mortar Domaining

In speaking with a client today concerning making his website, the entire campaign to get traffic and new business for his company unfolded. But the customer remarked,  that he was “just talking about a website”, but what I was talking about was marketing and advertising. I had a hard time not falling out of my chair. Where in the online business world, or even click and mortar commerce, did he think the two were supposed to be separated?

This client owned a small contracting business and had a FaceBook page. He was awake to the Internet possibilities.  But the effort to get the website up was “ongoing”. Big red flag: the client didn’t even have a domain picked out yet. This told me that no timetable or launch date had been set. Without these milestones, website projects and domain sites wither and die. Domains get registered by competitors because the project team waffles around.

One of the biggest reasons a website never happens is that the domain marketing effort is devoid of strategic initiative. The necessary decisions about form and intent never get made. Without a game plan the project simply never has a shape and becomes an endless talking point that ever materializes. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the client both scoffed at a coherent marketing plan and had no site up yet. The two tend to go together.

One of the ways to evaluate a potential website’s strengths and weaknesses is to see what kinds of options to participate visitors and referred readers will perceive when the landing page loads. Can they call, email, to stop by the office? Just the integration of company data to directories of local business was probably not even done.  A broad campaign to saturate the site with discoverable keyword elements and SEO related geo data was indicated.

Without anything online, there is nothing to market, discuss, or promote. Practically any business today that does not have a website feels very fly-by-night, not the vibe a customer is looking for in a construction contractor. This type of site can be as bare-bones as possible and still serve its purpose. Very little flash and flimflam features need to be added. I suggested the client author both write a blog detailing past projects with photos, and contribute to his own keyword rich forum describing construction issues.

Astonishingly, the client told me his brother was a web designer and was “working on the website”. This is another red flag. Websites are professional advertising tools, not weekend hobbies. Unless the strictest standards of professional respect are brought to bear, nothing will result. The world is full of back burner website projects that never see the light of day. That a family’s livelihood depends on this site production makes the situation acute.

The company name hadn’t even been searched for the associated domain name yet. I could tell at once that the “brother” was extremely ambiguous about the project and controlling his brother’s commercial success by suppressing progress. These are sticky dynamics where nothing but the truth will serve. I told the client to get his domain secured with capable hosting.

The client was wearing a company t-shirt with lots of text almost constructed like a minisite front page. The construction services, I told the client, had an appeal for immediate geographical users. These would be prospective customers who would be looking for companies to do work locally.  These,  I told this client, would be looking up the services using keywords and local city names or even possibly zip codes to find workers.

I advised this client  to emphasize his Spanish and English bi-lingual service and outline all the contracting services his company did with a short paragraph or two each. These would be a valuable SEO incorporation of important keywords relative to the search engine descriptors browsers would use to find local project help. I told him the information on his t-shirt, expanded into sentences and paragraphs, would make an excellent website.

I also suggested he link to another minipage where images and short descriptions from past projects could show people without reading how the company worked and what kinds of projects he did. This type of simple task compeltion would both lead to the meaning of the domain, but support its keyword and topical subject matter. We discussed a domain name with the geographic suffix if the company name dot-com was taken.

These steps immediately focused the domain buy and initiated a sketching out of the domain name in the customer’s mind. Every stage of the text construction and the content writing would now lead back to the domain name. With an independent hosting buy and a website project under personal control, the client was now individually responsible for his domain and construction progress for his new company website.

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28 February 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Oracle and Sun to unseat Godaddy?

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Word on the wires is that the new compendium of Oracle after swallowing Sun is giving birth to a great new brainchild. This new bonanza is a crashing spear into the world of domaining; A new domain name registrar and hosting company that will blow the socks off current market leaders (rhymes with Schmoe-daddy).  Sparcstations off the forward bow!

No name has been chosen by Sun/Oracle yet, but super secret teams in Cupertino and Mountain View are already clashing over turf. The technical entity will not be in violation of any super secret hosting or redundancy agreements because the new spinoff corporate entity will be a separate company. Sweet! The domainer’s mouth waters at the possible debut deals offered….

Domainers in the know and technical cognoscienti scoff that nobody can topple the Danica-fronted Big Daddy.  But hosting service watchers have heeded the firestorm of complaints that “Schmoe-daddy” customers have. Buying the registrar is the nice part, some domainer running an ICANN-powered fruit stand will make a tidy bundle.

Godaddy is going to lose a lot of share to the next big name/hosting reg that comes along.  A catchy name, a viral vid, and tier pricing by “Sunacle” could bring an avalanche of hosting customers their way. If Oracle and Sun can bring it to market and capture the whole domaining market, Sun will finally have beat Cisco at something.

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