Domain Owl

Many of the best domainers I know build fly by night websites or have scrabbled together some habits best left in the wastebasket. Some of the most expensive names in the auction houses can be constructed into websites using templates available to any newb domainer. Upon reading the updated ‘Designing with Web Standards” By Jeffrey Zeldman, (2010) I wished more webmasters would take some advice into account. Jeffrey Zeldman has been dubbed the “King of Web Standards” by Business Week. This book, published by Web Riders Press, outlines some new media points to consider when helming a website now. Everything from the font size of keywords to a comprehensive site redesign approach is handled here.

There are expressly good pieces of advice in this book concerning the difference between a regular website and a mobile version of that same website. The area treating “long tail” marketing hows the flexibility of the Internet to promote niche goods. There is the introduction of a project management software called basecamp (available at Basecamphq.com) that looks capable of mounting collaborative project based website. Not every webmaster stays up nights worrying about the comparative state of their code with respect to web standards, but this book helps explain why bad code or poorly constructed sites alienate users and don’t play well with other promotion services like RSS and Twitter.

‘Designing with Web Standards” By Jeffrey Zeldman, is hardly one of those pseudo-academic web textbooks that fairly scream with authority but teach little. This book motivates any webmaster to improve the state of their website for their own use as well as that of end users. One observation, that HTML is more forgiving or errors than XHTML, seems obvious but makes domainers think back to all those websites with the fancy handling that cost too much to put up. It still might be news to some webmasters that CSS web standards conserve user bandwidth and speed page loading for end users. This book puts software back in the webmaster’s hands, not vice versa.

For visual presentation, the box model on page 187 speaks to the organization of styles and look of the best semantic style of website composition. The box model enhances content as well as optimizes the visual presentation of any site content. This is the first book I have seen that debugs time killing CSS errors and analyzes how they can be fixed in terms laymen can understand. it’s also refreshing to see a website standard like CSS3 examined with an eye to detail that modern ten minute website webmasters can perceive the value of. This is a good boo for webmasters to sneak under the hood of what makes websites friendy and transparent versusoverly dense, messy, boxy and user-unfriendly.

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I don’t know who said it, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. While every web developer in existence today spends their time trolling the forums and talking up their sites, in my opinion the best way to gather new visitors to your website is to rely on tried and true thirty year old marketing methods. Because the tech and site might be new, but the way people interact and communicate is not. And those basic spurs to relating your website name and domain are what site traffic is made of.

Imagine you talk to a neighbor this morning briefly about your new website. This guy has fifteen things on his mind and nods comprehendingly to everything you say. But ten seconds after his Prius disappears out of view, he’ll have forgotten you conversation in the impending rush to take care of the items on his own agenda. But if he reached for a pencil, a Post-It, or a packet of instant coffee with your sites name on it, you’ve become the center of his universe.

In this day and age of ultra-mobile devices, everybody still wants to write things down. They scrabble through their purse, car, briefcase, sofa, anything to find that elusive writing device to jot something down. And later on, in a moment of boredom or metaphysical malaise or general pondering, the text of the url of your domain will reappear in front of their eyes. Those 3 a.m. breaks from World of Warcraft or raids on the refrigerator might give someone a new chance to check out your site.

Maybe it’s a TiVo episode number. Maybe it’s the name of that cool song third from last in the playlist. Maybe it’s the license plate of that guy who just cut him off in traffic. Or perhaps a critical phone number or two. But the universal need for a writing device remains the same. And the beauty of website advertising pencils is that they get passed on and re-used by entirely new sets of eyeballs who also wonder what that suite is about. This can start a conversation about the uses of such a site and build an expectation about what such a site can deliver.

Bumper stickers are the cheapest advertising in the world. This is the perfect solution for clients who cry foul at the cost of any manufactured promotional items. They are also the type of marketing domainers ignore.

Most domain name owners will stop short at actually printing materials or distributing items with their brand on them, even though every website worth its salt cries out to be seen and heard of. But the use of one pad of paper as a quick-and-dirty message pad in a large company for phone messages and reminders can generate a dozen or more unique page views. And these cost about the price of a flavored latte.

For the following example, assume the existence of freehubcaps.com. Hypothetically, if the domain owner of freehubcaps.com makes a template of a sticker or font size logo for the site,distant marketing contacts can print out their own stickers. The cost of marketing just went down to pennies a day.

That’s when writing the ads for Craigslist to advertise get very easy. When the marketing contact for a given website meets their target goal for their area (say 100), they receive a Paypal payment or Starbucks card charge or mailed gift card in the mail. A website owner with a similar site contacts 100 people who drive on crowded freeways in crawling rush hour traffic daily. It is likely that a bumper sticker featuring the website name would get a lot of eyeballs.

People are bored to distraction during work commutes, any website that looks like fun can be instantly dialed up via smart phone netbook or tablet. At the very least, twenty bumper stickers promoting a website in a given metro market could show targeted traffic. Just handing out business cards on a crowded subway train in a major metropolitan market can earn some great geo-based clicks easily trackable back to the promotion.

These types of promotion will always work in conjunction with the subject matter of the website and the attractiveness of the domain name. Having the site optimized and ready is a absolute prerequisite to any domain name (website) promotions campaign. this makes the distribution of business cards to niche users easy.

A sports site might have a group of business cards distributed at a sports bar. Gaming site cards can be handed out where ever gamers are found (libraries, schools, coffee shops). Shopping websites might be handed out in parking lots or left on car windshields. These are old school tricks for new era traffic farming. And so on. Finding clicks from that niche market just got easy, and doable.

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While navigating three hosting accounts in one morning I remembered more than I wish I had forgotten about the in’s and out’s of relative advantages of different hosting companies. Administrating Wordpress websites is about as easy as being a webmaster can get short of editing mere HTML pages strung together. But it can still be a headache. And performing tasks in MySQL on no coffee is torture.

I went between Godaddy.com and 1 & 1 Hosting, between 1 & 1 hosting and Hostgator, and back again from Hostgator.com to Godaddy again. This is the chore when different hosting accounts get different parts of the hosting account offering formula right and different parts of it wrong. Experiencing multiple hosting account interfaces before breakfast can take a lot of elbow grease and keyboard forgiveness.

A lot depends on the browser. At one point in the project I realized I had both Firefox and Internet Explorer open because one hosting account stayed open better in Explorer while another transited better between navigation screens in Explorer. But Explorer seemed more secure in certain parts of the hosting account interface where security was tighter, and Firefox sort of stalled in the Backup/Restore pathway of commands.

GoDaddy.com does have a cornered market on the Godaddy Hosting Connection installation utility. It’s a nice arrangement that unfortunately you have to learn to be comfortable with. Control panel and ControlPanel Deluxe have that absolute party favorite of all hosting account surfers, Fantastico. Except to get version information you have to sift carefully and compare versions and perform upgrades per application before executing database restore and upload tasks.

The jury is never really out when debating which hosting account vendor online is the best. Certainly Enom.com is a stable bedrock names registrar. but just try and get a name hosted there or working with any application without Indian medicinal juju working for you. Frustration with one hosting account leads to the germination of another at a new company. This cycle can only continue so far.

Godaddy.com has the most fluid domain manager but the bells and whistles flavor of the nonstop “Buy This” circus inside a hosting login can’t exhaust even a patient webmaster fast. This administration environment seems very commercial next to the minimal functionality of the Hostgator Control panel. The Fantastico “hosting connection” delivers good install functionality for third party applications, if the versions are consistent with the “exit” versions on other outgoing site hosting accounts.

What this means is that a WordPress install at Godaddy might be at Wordpress 3.01.01 yet the Fantastico release at HostGator might have the WordPress installation release only at 2.98.2. This means the security and support is not guaranteed for custom tweaks and plugins that are the main feature of the updated Wordpress. Backwards blog migration is never a pretty site.

Thus the hosting account selection equation might be reduced to the smoothest and most updated installation suite. Yet so many functions inside the Control Panel (except Fantastico) can remain untouched for the life of the account. Or worse, they can be experimentally tried with brilliant reactions of equal parts of glee, panic and chaos. Having the tech support number close at hand is a must.

The hosting at 1&1 hosting is a curiosity to me. The custom tweaked interface for administration of the hosting account seems to mask more than it reveals of available and necessary domaining chores. The ease of use never seems to be 100% there. For a domainer intent on SEO and marketing and domain name promotion, supposedly only programmers venture this far.

I have a 1 & 1 hosting account that it took a considerable amount of time to cancel, simply because the process was so labyrinthine I barely got the confirmation of the account cancellation in time. I got quickly into the habit of not using the account because I didn’t like the interface as was constantly stalled by the “lookup and see” factor involved in very simple tasks.

To be sure, Godaddy captures a big part of its hosting and domain business from ease of use and familiarity. But not often do I get the opportunity to see triple hosting company side by side performance. I remember how much I resisted the Godaddy interface on my journey from ControlPanel. I like the direct file management approach but miss the protections and hidden file attributes of the Godaddy File manager.

For the 1 & 1 Hosting file access was almost impossible, rendering many templates and theme graphics closed to customization. I used to cling tearfully to my Control panel until an installation version got so vulnerable to failure almost every operation was liable to disappear from day to day. This is the sort of thing that causes hosting account migration.

My love affair with Fantastico was long and meaningful. But many other administration options when navigating through reseller accounts and multiple hosting trees became necessary. Godaddy is a hosting account utility most webmasters will shoulder sooner or later simply by nature of the amount of domains hosted there. Until there is a definitive result for the best hosting company for SEO, the choice for domainers remains personal.

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The bland, hosting-company-logo studded, default 404 page result is a slap in the face to an intensive results hungry web visitor. It says to experienced web user, ’something is amok here”. Since well-seasoned domainers know that editing an HTML web page supplied at every hosting company install is a merely WYSIWYG click away, a default text style 404 page is free advertising gone to waste.

There’s all kinds of reasons your webby visitor might get on the wrong end of the 404 message. Maybe the link they clicked on is outdated, and the webmaster has since moved things around. Perhaps their browser is not updated enough to render the page right and the browser security has prevented a codezilla nightmare that will stall the end user’s computer.

The appeal of the custom 404 page shows the domain owner’s creativity and their attitude toward the site.  This can be problematic when the 404 page issues without a second thought from the domain administrator or webmaster.Maybe there is an HTML rendering traffic jam or error in a resident script is parking visitors in the “no-fly” zone on purpose.

A good 85% of casual domainers don’t routinely check their error statistics and find out where all the missed traffic has gone. They’d rather tear their hair out desperately looking for stray type-ins. But if they had only inserted a contact email or contact form into their 404 behavior, then their users might have had a holding pattern that ended up with some contact with the site or its architect.

Believe it or not, there are still some webmasters out there who don’t know how to position their domain pointer or reset the attribute that formats error behavior inside their individual hosting account domains. This can be varied in the interface presentation but is a vital part of any hosting an domain registrar function. Access to 404 error behavior is a must for any hosting account if the domain registrar does not handle this task.

But the webmaster can utilize the 4o4 page for his own aims. He can make the energy channel back into a positive area and create interest in your site with a custom 404 error page. These are one of many support opportunities that can spell additional profile details for SEO as well as provide usership experiences which conform to site goals. A redirect is also a helpful tool, guiding users to another part of the website that a home link that works.

A 404 page is an HTML file displayed during predefined sets of approach vectors to the website. generally the visitor comes to the landing page. But the operation of the Internet is not perfect, accidents happen. Sometimes a link isn’t typed in right. A qualified 404 page with custom information about why the browser has reached that page continues the website experience for the user even when they can’t reach it.

The theme, font, and architecture of the Custom 404 page should be made with due thought. Is it a surfing site? A message like “Dude we are so messed up” goes right with the voice and tone viewers might expect. Is the site based for News? Parents? Adults? Kids ?404 error pages should be appropriately themed.

Also, 404 error behavior analysis can tell webmasters where the bulk of their stumped traffic is going, and form where. Finding that link and fixing it can deliver the proper audience from a previous promotion effort. Agrressive SEO chasers will evaluate their error behavior inside each domain and url today, and see where those lost users are going. Otherwise webmasters might never know.

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The great book, ‘Building Findable Websites” explains it all for the crafty, SEO hungry webmaster and domainer. Building Findable Websites is a great must read for online professionals looking to promote a domain, launch, or enterprise using a website. The discoverability of a website and the keyword density of its pages are the new game in town online.

The opportunities to seed keywords into the interior of your website had long been a staple of webmasters working with topical domain names. Even the “About Us” and Terms of Service sections of a website can be dense with references to the important words and themes that search engines recognize are central to your site topic.

If you doubt the veracity of this statement or believe it sounds like hype, start scanning the source code of individual web pages you visit and review the employment of keywords and the site name within the code. If you are a savvy SEO experienced webmaster, you will recognize a lot of these tricks and old standbys.

Looking for ways to re-introduce topical keywords into your site is an ongoing process. Using the content text inside the <title> and inside the heading tags should be a lesson learned at the knee of your HTML tutorial. First lines and first paragraphs of the web pages are also important ways to restate the intent of the webmaster with every text block.

To build progressively on the meta description with SEO topical keywords, associated posts should exists all over the web concerning your site. the search engines will take note when secondary keywords align with description or interrogative text elsewhere that link back. Just using default installation pages is the pattway to mediocrity.

One notable point within the Walter method is the inclusion of the keyword within the URL. Every time I have ever named a database or built a directory, as well as named the administrator user account name, I have kept the site topic in mind. Instances of descriptive world and related types of content should appear as often inside the site as possible.

Writing regularly on a focused topic isn’t enough. Attributes, table elements, and other dynamics lurking inside your page code should be embroidered as creatively and aggressively as possible to enhance SEO discoverability. By encouraging search engine discoverability, generation of SEO results will include your site more and more.

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