Steve’s Blog

One of the great things about working in technology is that exciting developments occur so frequently. Some ideas are gone within months whereas others change the business completely. Whether the events of October 2006 go down as boom or bust might not be known for several years, but I thought it might be interesting to revisit two events that have the potential to reshape the World Wide Web.

Internet Explorer 7

Throughout the history of the Internet there has been but one way to surf the Internet – using Roman characters. If you’re language used any script other than A to Z, then you were stuck trying to navigate through a world that made little sense to you. If you wanted to visit a website you would need to type in a foreign language.

All that is slowly changing and the process recently received a huge boost from the release of the first version of Internet Explorer. Version 7 is the first to support IDNs (International Domain Names) so it is now possible to search for “DVD Player” or “Digital Camera” in your native language rather than in English.  It means that numerous Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Arabic-speaking people who previously had difficulty in surfing the web will now have the opportunity.

This new generation of consumers shopping and interacting online will present a large new market for those companies savvy enough to take advantage.

Both China and India are on course to have more Internet users than the United States by the end of 2007 and the launch of Internet Explorer will hasten that event.

Mobi

“Isn’t that whale?” “Wasn’t that a dance music DJ?” Its easy to make fun of the name but the launch of the .mobi domain name extension has the potential to accelerate the number of people who use the internet on their phone rather than their P.C.

Those of you who surf from your BlackBerry or cellphone already know that many sites do not work on the small screen. In comparison. .mobi has restrictions ensuring that all websites with a .mobi ending will work correctly on the move. Essentially, the aim of the extension is to take the guesswork out of using the mobile Internet. If you go to a .mobi site you will get a site that works.

There are still financial and technological problems to overcome. Surfing via a cellphone is still not easy or within the price range of most people but that is likely to change within the next two or three year.

Flowers.mobi sold for $200,000 and Fun.mobi fetched $100,000 at a recent auction and those sales have only increased the excitement about the possibility that .mobi could become the next .com. Already 4 handheld devices are sold worldwide for every 1 desktop computer. The future of the Internet is mobile. Many people are hoping it will also be .mobi.

When setting up a retail business, there are many hoary clichés and pieces of advice. “Out of sight, out of mind” is among the oldest and the hoariest. It basically warns you to buy or lease the best real estate available to you in order to make your company visible.

Well, what was true in the 1900s is still true today, and thus you should be thinking about buying good real estate online. Domain names are often referred to as “21st century real estate” and this is declared with good reason. A good domain can make a business. A bad name can have the opposite effect.

This month’s column is a beginner’s guide to seeking out the perfect domain name for your business.

Shorter is Sweeter

If there is one rule of thumb, it is that shorter domains will be more valuable than longer ones. The shorthand most commonly used is “L” for a letter and “N” for a number.

So I6.com would be a LN.com and 2BBQ.net would be a NLLL.net. What is the difference in price between the different combinations?

LL.com. A well-know example is KW.com which is used by Keller Williams, the realtors. There are only 676 available (26 x 26). These can fetch anywhere from $50,000 to several million dollars. EZ.com is currently on the market for a seven-figure price.

LLL.com. Obviously these are substantially cheaper than LL.com simply because there are 17576 potential combinations (26 x 26 x 26).  However, they still sell for a pretty penny – anywhere between $2,000 and millions of dollars, depending on the value of the letters. To give one example, ABC.com would be towards the top of this range whereas ZQW.com would be toward the bottom.

LLLL.com, LLLLL.com and higher. This is where people like me and you are normally able to enter the market. You won’t be able to get a dictionary word for less than $10,000 but an acronym may be available for registration or for purchase at a cheap price. Put bluntly, Golf.com is out of our range, but TSInc.com or a similar domain that makes sense may be available.

Domain Prices are Like Scrabble

Domains are often graded according to the letters they contain. It’s the opposite of Scrabble – the more common a letter is, the more it is worth. An example of a premium letter is C, because it stands for company or corporation and it also appears in a wide range of acronyms. Others are A, B, D, E, I, M, N and P. Letters that are less common are less valuable, for example: J, U, K, V, W, Z, Q and X.

You Don’t Have to Focus on .com….

…..but I would recommend it. Another possibility is .net which normally sells for around 1/20th of the price of a .com. The only real rival that I can see emerging to these is .us which sells for approximately 1/50th of the price of a .com. Deciding to go with a .us is a choice that you can make if you will be selling exclusively within the United States. If you do decide to go with an alternative, be prepared to lose some leads to the .com version of your domain name. The question is whether the extra clients are worth the extra cost.

Clients Make Mistakes – You Make Allowances

I probably make a typing mistake in every sentence I write and I bet your customers are little different. If you have a name that is easy to misspell, I would strongly recommend that you try to buy those typos of your domain also. This is particularly important for companies that have long domain names. SmithPlumbing.com may lose a lot of potential clients to someone that has a website called SmithPluming.com.

Typogen.com is a tool that can help you generate common misspellings of your name and you can also use a more prosaic method: open an Excel document and type your domain name. Press “Return” and type it again. Repeat this around 100 times and then get a couple of friends or colleagues to do the same thing. By the time you are done, you will have a great list of potential typos for your business` name.

Domains are 21st Century Real Estate

Which means that you can think of your name as an investment. If you have a generic name that other people can use for their business such as baseballbats.com or Hdtelevisions.com that it is a reasonable bet that you can sell it for more later. Domains often increase in value simply because of their age – Search Engines trend to trust older domains more than new one.s

A good domain name is an asset rather than an expense for your business – and it doesn’t depreciate in value.

Where to find out more:

DNJournal.com – This site contains a list of the all the domains sold in the past year.

Sedo.com – An online marketplace for buying and selling domain names.

NamePros.com and DNForum.com – Web forums with plenty of advice on buying a domain name.

Like so much of like, getting started on the web is often a case of trial-and-error with people making plenty of mistakes in their first months and years online. In order to help our clients we’ve developed some guidelines to help people find their feet and we though we’d share them this month. This WebSavvy is a cut-out-and-keep guide to how much you should be looking to pay for important services.

Domain Names

Under no circumstances should you be paying more than $10 per year for a .com, .net or .org domain name. The companies that actually register the domains normally get them for $3 to $6. A 50% mark-up on that is the maximum you should be expected to pay. Very reputable companies such as GoDaddy.com sell domains for less than $9. For that price you should also expect some extra such as email, domain forwarding and domain name server management. If they expect you to pay extra for them and that takes it over $10 – run a mile. Companies that are guilty of this and should be avoided include: NetworkSolutions.com and Register.com. Over at AllediaDomains.com we offer .coms for $7.45 and add-on services for a dollar.

Hosting

The cost of hosting really depends on what software your website is using and how big your site is. What I can do is give you some general rules of thumb to follow. Nearly all small business can exist happily with the “small” option. The large option involves having a dedicated server all to yourself and is only necessary if you have thousands of people accessing your site on a daily basis. Of course, once you start to reach 100,000s of people per day you will need more than what is on this list, but most small companies should pay no more than $120 per year for hosting. 

	Small	Medium	Large
HTML, PHP	$10 per month	$20 per month	$100 per month
ASP (Microsoft)	$10 per month	$35 per month	$200 per month

Maintenance

A maintenance contract from a web design company should cost no more than $100 per month unless they are actively updating and working on the site. You would need a very good reason to pay any more than this.

Contracts

The first thing to say is that you should never sign a long-term contract for web services. You’ve heard about how old-fashioned cell phone companies that force you to sign a 2-year contract are being squeezed by more customer-friendly brands that allow you to cancel at any time? So it is online. If you can’t pay month-by-month then you need to go elsewhere. A long-term contract is a company’s way of saying that they’re not confident that their product and prices are good enough to keep you.

Web Design

Whereas the first four topics were relatively straightforward, webdesign is a more complex area with different niches. Again, some ballpark figures might be the best idea. You should be able to higher a very good webdesigner for between $50 and $80 per hour. For very demanding and complex tasks which demand rare skill-sets you can justifiably expect to pay between $75 and $150. Any more than that and you really should be shopping around and comparing prices from rival firms.

All in all, the Internet is a great hotbed of capitalism. The sheer number of companies offering their services means that price-competition is strong. It’s a buyers market and I hope you’ll be able to take full advantage.

 

Is there anything more off-putting than a visiting website to buy something and seeing © 1998 at the bottom? Well, yes‚Ķ.trying to keep your site up-to-date and relevant can seem equally disheartening.

A few years ago, if you‚Äôre company had some exciting news you‚Äôd call up your web-designer, hand over $200, wait in-line while they dealt with their other clients, finally get your small changes made, see they‚Äôd made a mistake, call them up, wait in line…

Well, people have been working on software to simplify that whole frustrating process and put the power to update your websites into YOUR hands. If you’re looking for an easy way to publish and manage your company’s news and information online, you might consider Content Management Systems (CMS). At first sight, a CMS might be mistaken for a blog, but although similar they have several clear advantages.

WHY NOT TO USE A BLOG

A lot of people keep blogs but there are key reasons why they are generally considered inappropriate for companies:

1. To make a really interesting blog you need to allow people to comment on your articles. This can work if you have a lot of time to manage the comments but otherwise they can fill up quickly with spam, rude comments and other things that will reflect badly on your company.
2. Blogs thrive on controversial and outlandish opinions. That means your company needs to keep up a constant stream of patter. This isn’t recommended unless you’re building a business on the back of your personality ala Donald Trump from “the Apprentice” or Jim Kramer from “Mad Money”.
3. They are limited in their what they can do. Most blogs don’t offer the possibility of adding an online store, a portfolio of your company’s work or calendar of events. A CMS can do all of this.

WHY USE A CMS

1. The key idea behind a Content Management System is that people need a really easy way to manage and categorise their content. So if you write an article about a project your company has just finished you can store it under “Projects”. If its about a new member of staff then it can be filed under “Staff”. A good CMS is something your grandmother could understand and run.
2. A CMS expands easily with your company. If you’d like to add a photo gallery, portfolio, event calendar or other new feature, it can be done with a few mouse clicks. The software has been already written and developed. The possibilities are numerous.
3. Large numbers of developers work on CMS software. There’s a phrase in web design called “Golden Handcuffs”. Basically it means that once a designer has their hands on your site they can make it so complex that you have to keep hiring them because only they can understand it. With a CMS you can easily find someone plenty of other people to help you out.
4. Most are free. Some are for sale but many high-quality CMS are distributed free-of-charge.

Overall, a CMS can offer an excellent way to make sure that your site welcomes visitors with your latest news and a tagline that reads © 2006.

WHICH CMS TO CONSIDER

• Joomla (www.joomla.org). Regarded as the most user-friendly of all CMS.
• Drupal (www.drupal.org). Good if you need lots of users with the permission to do different tasks on the site.
• To take a trial run of many free CMSs you can visit www.opensourcecms.com