We have launched a great promotion for our business pro ecommerce package in conjunction with PayPal. The first 50 new customers who purchase a 123-reg annual business pro ecommerce account and sign up and trade on a PayPal Express Checkout or Website Payments Pro account, receive £119 in cashback.

The cashback will get paid directly into the PayPal account after 3 months of active trading. We had to put in some strict terms & conditions as we want to reward customers who are serious about selling online and not those that are only in it for the quick buck.

Terms apply.

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As some of you may know, since Monday 05.05.08 Google has started to allow advertisers to bid on other company’s brand names. Previously banned in the UK (but allowed in the USA), competitors are now allowed to show one of their adverts when some searches for another company’s brand name.

We have already started to see other web hosts biddng on our brand names, and through out other industries these adverts are starting to crop up. Check out lastminute.com, moneysupermarket.com, and iPod.

Important
In order to clarify our position regarding affiliates, I would like to emphasise that affiliates who have joined our programs through 123-reg itself, Commission Junction or TradeDoubler are prohibited by the terms and conditions from bidding on our brand names (123-reg, WebFusion, Donhost & SupaNames).

Any affiliate found to be bidding on our brand name or using our brand name to advertise on another company’s brand name will be removed from the program and no commission paid for any sales made from those adverts. This may seem a little strong but it is vital we maintain control of our brand and where we are seen to be advertising, as well as our relationship with fellow web hosting companies.

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I’ve been off on holiday for the last couple of weeks, and as usual my return to the office this morning has resulted in an inbox full of messages and an RSS reader full of interesting articles.

My effort to catch up on all the interesting news and posts from my favourite sites is largely in vain (there’s too much to read and too many other important things to do), but here are a few domain-related items that caught my eye:

• America.com is up for sale. The reserve price is over $1m - if that doesn’t put you off, the auction starts on 22 May.
• An independent appeals panel has overturned the decision to award the domain myspace.co.uk to social networking website MySpace. This is the latest twist of events in the story we reported on previously.
• Nominet held its 2008 AGM. Two board members were elected. 
• 16 years after the end of the Soviet Union, the old .su domain extension just won’t die. Nostalgia for the Soviet empire and entrepreneurs who see value in the extension are apparently responsible for a 45 per cent increase in registrations this year.
• To coincide with St George’s Day, a campaign was launched for the creation of a .eng domain. Similar .cym and .sco campaigns for Wales and Scotland already exist.

So what other interesting stuff have I missed? Leave a comment to let me know.

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Thanks to all our millions of customers we are the first to register one million .uk domains on one tag.

To celebrate this, we are now giving away a free .uk domain with selected hosting, InstantSite and ecommerce packages.

If you don’t have your hosting, ecommerce or InstantSite yet, get it now plus a free .uk domain.

Terms apply.

 

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I personally don’t register a lot of domain names. The domains I do own tend to those I stumbled across that I can’t believe no one else has already got, or I have an idea for a site and in a rush of blood register the domain name and then lose all energy towards the project (the ‘gonibbler’ debacle still hangs heavily over me). Recently I started looking for a domain name with these criteria in mind:

• Encapsulate the theme of the website
• Easy to remember
• Easy to spell
• A brandable name e.g. not simply descriptive of the service
• .com & .co.uk both available to prevent traffic going to someone else

I’ll be honest I found it very hard. I started typing in quite generic words, combining them, mixing them around, but nothing hit the mark. For the first time I had to start doing some research into related words and phrases that I could use. If you find yourself in the same position where you are struggling to find a domain name you are happy with here are my tips:

Use a thesaurus for inspiration
Type in the core theme of your website in to a thesaurus and see if you can find any related keywords that you like. For example in you have an online shop you could type in “store” and you will be presented with words such as; backlog, cache, inventory, nest egg, reserve, reservoir, stock, stockpile, treasure, store, boutique, emporium, outlet

Go web 2.0
Web 2.0 style domain names are all the rage, and they are proven to be an effective method of branding and easy to remember. Good examples include flickr, wuffo, bliin and zoogmo. To create your web 2.0 simply remove a vowel (e.g. trackr), add a vowel or two (e.g. miiix), add two unrelated short words together (e.g. snapfrog) or use utter jibberish (e.g. boblr).
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You search and you search and still you can’t find a domain name that is easy to remember, sounds cool, and is related to your website’s subject. Has every word and variation on a theme been taken? It can certainly feel that way sometimes, and it can be tempting to go for a web 2.0 style domain name like gufful.com or boblr.com (feel free to have them, I just made them up), but help is at hand (que trumpets and gospel chants) with the 123-reg domain name suggestion tool.

Search for your domain name as normal and if you find the extension you want has been taken, simply click on the link “Can’t find the domain you’re looking for? Try our domain suggestions tool.” and thanks to some fancy semantic software you will be given a list of related alternatives to choose from.

Even if you decide to search again it can be a great source for ideas on alternative words to try and different combinations to play with.

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If you own Microsoft Excel 2007 and you have a Microsoft adCenter advertising account, a no brainer download has to be their adCenter add-in (Beta) for Excel 2007.

I have Excel 2007 on my personal lap top and I downloaded this keyword research add-in recently and I have been really impressed. I haven’t come across another free tool that gives you this amount of actionable data for free. I’ll be amazed if Google don’t offer somnething similar with their spreadsheet software some time this this year.

If anyone has used this already or is in fact aware of another tool that does all this for free, let us know!

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The office celebrated St George’s day yesterday and the majority of people showed up in costumes or red and white clothing. With dragons, horses and knights around the office we thought there would be some dragon slaying at some point but the day was celebrated peacefully and with lots of cake served by fair maidens.

For those that are not sure what St. George’s day is all about, take a look here

On the right is an example of a shiny knight (guarding some cake) who was one of the winners of the costume competition.

 

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Custom search on your site
If you have a content heavy site with lots of pages and regularly updated content, keeping it all easily accessible to site visitors is tricky. Rather than having to code your own site tool, simply copy and paste Google’s custom search code in to your site and you will magically have a site search tool.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

HTML editor
If you are ready to upgrade from WYSIWYG template software and you are frustrated with notepad, a great free HTML editor with built in FTP is coffeecup.com’s HTML editor 9.http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.

Free images
Creating an interesting site with no pictures can be a pain, but it is not always worth shelling out for the license to use a picture. A great source of free pictures can be found through Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

CSS templates
Just because I know how to use a paint brush doesn’t mean I can paint, and that’s true of graphical web design tools. Rather than hacking away for hours to make your website look presentable, leave it to the pro’s and download a free template that is ready to go.
http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/

Click on “Read the rest of this entry »” for links to:

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Passwords and codes are a part of everyday life now. There is no escaping it. However, is are you choosing ones which are strong enough to defeat the new bread of password hacking cyber criminals?

When you have to put a password into multiple systems many times a day, it can be tempting to choose a really simple one, then never change it. Worse, you might write it down on a piece of paper. I’ll put my hands up - I used to be guilty of this.

However, when these passwords can be all that’s protecting your email or your bank account, it’s worth taking the effort to make them hard to break. I’ve learnt there are a few tips that will help you make your passwords stronger and foil those pesky password hacking criminals.

It can be very tempting to use a word or number that’s easy to remember as your password. However, these are very easy to crack, putting your private information at risk from. Here are some tips on how to make a strong, hacking-resistant password that will help improve your security on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

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