There’s been lots of interesting news in the domain name world recently. We went a bit quiet here last week (sorry about that), so instead of covering each story individually, here’s a summary of some of the big things that have caught my eye lately:

• It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in the world of banking, and as the BBC reports, even domain name speculators have been getting in on the act, registering domains like lloydstsbhbos.com in anticipation of the Halifax’s acquisition by Lloyds TSB.
• In the same vein, over at Domain Name Wire they reckon that domain names might be a good investment if stock markets keep falling. They explain in another article that “whereas the stock market seems to swing wildly each day, the domain market holds somewhat stable.” At the very least, it’s an interesting way to look at spreading your investment risk.
• Some domain names have been changing hands for big money too. The topical financialaid.com went for $800,000 and LifeInsurancePolicies.com went for $15,000. Oh, and according to the Domainers Gazette, someone paid $69 for possibly the worst domain name ever. Read the rest of this entry »

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There reaches a stage in many web site owner’s lives where their web design skill set is not at the level they need to fulfill their vision. As a frustrated web designer myself (i.e. I enjoy coding but I have zero eye for design) I have often thought about paying some one else to set up a site for me to get the ball rolling. But with every man and his uncle claiming to be able to design a website, what questions should you be asking a prospective designer; be it a friend, someone recommended to you or someone who advertises their services?

“Have you any examples of previous work and what was your contribution to that project?”
Never take anyone on blind, and nail them down as to what they actually did on that site. For big projects they may simply have added a new logo or added some code, but they put the entire site in their portfolio.

“Will you provide a content management system so I can add new content myself easily?”
You do not want to be in a position where every time you need to make the smallest change to your web site’s copy you have to contact them, and probably be charged for the change. Make sure they empower you through the addition of a content management system such as Wordpress.

“Will you set up the web hosting account and register the domain name in my name and address?”
This is a massive point and one you must ask. We get a lot of issues at 123-reg where a designer has bought the hosting and registered the domain using their own details and further down the line the site ’owner’ finds out they in fact are not the legal owner, the designer is.

“Will you give me all the source files?”
A web page is made up of multiple components and source files, e.g. logo, picture, CSS file(s), HTML, PHP etc which in a couple of years you may want to edit or change completely. If you don’t have the files that make up your site and don’t want to use the same designer again, you’ll have to start from scratch!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Since we starting writing this blog just under 18 months ago, traffic to this section of 123-reg has been growing steadily each month. Earlier this week I was looking back at some of the earlier posts and thought it was a shame new readers will never come across some of the useful and interesting content we wrote early on. Below are the 6 posts I think stood out in the first year or so of the blog…

1. The Chris Anderson interview
By far the most visited and commented on post we have ever done, John was able to get an interview with Wired editor and author of “The long Tail” Chris Anderson about his new concept of the free economy.

2. Search engine pay per click guide
Early on in the blog’s life I wrote a 5 part guide for beginners using search engine pay per click (SEPPC) advertising. The link above will take you to the final part, but that has links to the other 4 for you to check out.

3. Pet porn and hand grenades
The best post title we have ever had, and one which would have made it on this list regardless of the content I like it that much. Luckily it is also a very interesting interview with the founder of the “Darwin awards” website.

4. Tips to improve your website copy
One of those areas that is so important but often done in a rush or and with no planning.

5. The award for our most controversial post goes to…
This post received the angriest reponses we have had after we made the mistake of questioning the background of a number of well known domain names

6. Writing an effective PPC advert
With only 25 characters (including spaces) for your title and 70 for the main body of the ad, getting noticed, communicating your message and getting clicked on can be an art.

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Server and networking company Akamai has released the second of its quarterly reports investigating The State of the Internet.

Just like the last edition, it examines security issues (including where attacks on websites come from) and significant news items. It also looks at broadband adoption rates and what it calls significant ‘network events’ - I think this include things like outages and connectivity problems.

The report is a fairly interesting look at the state of things online, though it doesn’t seem to contain any really groundbreaking news. You can get it from the Akamai website. A couple of interesting snippets I noticed:

• In May, hackers used a security hole to gain access to the Epilepsy Foundation website. They posted flashing images designed to cause seizures in site visitors with photosensitive epilepsy. How low can you get?
• Global internet capacity is expanding significantly, with 16 new undersea cables planned for over the next three years. Amongst others, they’ll link India with the Middle East and Cyprus with mainland Europe. The report says this continued growth is necessary as we continue to watch more and more video online.

It’s worth having a look at the full report if you have a few minutes to spare.

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It looks like at least one domain name opportunist is trying to cash in on the coverage surrounding John McCain’s presidential running mate, Sarah Palin.

The Alaskan was catapulted onto the world stage last week when she became only the second ever female US vice-presidential candidate.

We don’t normally cover US politics in great detail on this blog, but I noticed this morning that someone is offering the catchy domain name, esarahpalin.com on eBay. You can find the auction here.

Bidding starts at a bargain $10m, but if you want to be absolutely certain of securing this awesome domain name, you’ll need to fork out $21m to close the auction early using eBay’s Buy it Now feature. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the last month or so, a bunch of 50 brave (or foolish?) volunteers have opened themselves up to a world of spam. Security company McAfee gave each of them a new laptop and email address, and instructed them to use the internet unprotected for 30 days.

I reckon this experiment would have been quite fun to take part in. Participants were encouraged to click on whatever they liked online, just to see what would happen. As you can imagine, throwing caution to the wind online produces some interesting results.

For instance, you can probably sympathise with that ‘what if…’ feeling which occurs when one of those pop-up windows advertising an unbelievable offer appears.

You know that whatever it says (usually that you’ve won millions of dollars, or something similar), it’s almost certainly a scam. And you daren’t click it because to do so will probably bring your computer to its knees and pass your email address on to purveyors of all sorts of embarrassing wares. Read the rest of this entry »

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The National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) used to investigate serious and organised crimes committed on the internet. In 2006 it became part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

Although the NHTCU ceased to exist about two years ago, its old website (which used to be located at www.nhctu.org) is still linked to by a number of high-profile websites. For instance, the BBC added a link to it from this story just over a month ago.

With the old website address getting this sort of attention, you’d have thought the domain name would be worth taking care of. It clearly attracts some traffic (probably quite a lot), so commonsense suggests it would be a good idea to keep renewing it.

After all, if it was allowed to expire, the domain name could be snapped up by anyone. They could use it for anything. For instance, someone could use the address to host a malicious website which could infect computers with viruses. Read the rest of this entry »

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I logged into my RSS reader as usual today to check up on the latest industry news and information. And it’s turned out to be one of those days where every site is reporting the same story.

Google is launching its own web browser, to be called Google Chrome.

You can read about it on the BBC, the Register, TechCrunch and Lifehacker. Or you can go straight to the horse’s mouth, and get the official version from the Google blog.

The company let the cat out of the bag earlier than intended when it mailed a comic book to key websites and bloggers. It looks like Google Blogscoped was first with the news.

If you want to check out Google Chrome for yourself, it’s being released in beta (for Windows only) sometime today. I guess it could appear online any time after lunchtime here in the UK. Update: Google Chrome can now be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome.

Main features

Everyone’s got their own take on this, but from a quick flick through the comic, plus a skim of the other websites out there, these seem to be the new browser’s main features: Read the rest of this entry »

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