When setting up your website one of the most important aspects will be to choose a domain name. It’s that domain name that will stick with you for the lifetime of your site. You can change the template, change the purpose of the site, fire a designer, hire a designer, but you just cannot change that domain name (unless you scrap it and do a redirect). Finding an available domain name that you like and that is appropriate for the purpose of your site is complicated. Here are a few things to think about when choosing a domain name:
1. Match the domain name to actual name of your site
One of the easiest and best alternatives is to get a domain name that matches the actual name of your site. It’s a duh statement but so many people forget to match the site. You will increase your branding as well as make it easy for visitors to remember the name of your site. The worst thing that can happen is if people fall head over heels for your site but can not find it again simply because the domain name is not the same as the name of your site. For example if you have a bakery site, don’t call it StubbornNelly.com. No one will have a clue what your theme is. Call it, TastyPastry.com, or even Anne Cookies around the corner.com.
2. Keep it short – and Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS)
Keeping the domain name short is a challenge if you are looking for a .com domain as all three and four letter words are already taken. Yep, and all standard English words are gone too (designer.com, awesome.com). Coming up with a name that is short will be easier to remember and pass along by word of mouth. But remember, a domain name should however not be kept short just for the sake of keeping it short. Do not use acronyms as a url if they look bad as an acronym. Think of all those failed websites because people did not see different words as one word. Like don’t come up Patterns, Octogons and Other Pics and give it POOP.com. That’s a failed domain name.
Some great short named domains:
- IBM.com (why call it international business machines)
- digg.com (i dig you, you dig me)
- Match.com (find a matching partner)
3. Use keywords
Optimizing your domain name for search engines is a big help. In using one or two of your single most important keywords you will have better chances of getting a higher rank on the search results, thus increasing traffic. This will not be easy, as most “natural” names already are taken. Combine an important keyword then with something secondary. These sites came up with great names:
- GraphicDesignBlog.com
- TutorialMagazine.com
- Dev-Tips.com
4. Describe your site
Your domain name is an excellent way of describing what your site is all about. Say for example that you manage a site about fishing. Your domain name should in some way describe that fishing is exactly what your visitors will find on the site. Again, fishing is a major keyword of your site, so exploit it with a well picked domain name.
5. Avoid confusion
In general, domain names are not expensive. Register domains with misspellings of your original domain if you want to make sure you catch most type in domain traffic. Redirect those misspelled domains to the main website. This is a great for sites that use hard to spell words or need to protect their brand identity. Examples:
- Google.com
- Googel.com
- Gogle.com
6. Consider alternative domain extensions
If it is impossible to find a good domain name with the prefix .com you might want to consider using an alternative domain extension. Many countries have opened up their country code top level domain for international registration. This is perhaps your chance to create the perfect domain hack. Examples:
- Del.icio.us
- Ma.tt
- Designm.ag
Picking a domain name will take time, energy and some creativity from your side but its worth it in the end. The last tip is to checkout recently expired domain names at snapnames.com – many names will be awful or cost a fortune, but once in a while you will be able find a real gem at a reasonable fee. Good luck on finding the domain of your dreams!
All the new browser updates seem to be coming out at the same time, which definitely keeps the competition interesting. But while you continue to scoff at IE, gush over Firefox, and smile nervously at Opera, Chrome, and Safari, have you heard that ordinary computer users don’t actually know what a web browser is? Let’s get to that in a bit…
Internet Explorer is the “best”
IE8 Comparison (comic by Brad Colbow)
I think people around the world made a collective ROFLMAO when the infamous IE8 browser comparison chart came out. I reserved any biased judgment when I first saw it, but oh my, Microsoft sure knows how to put its best features forward.
That’s not all it’s doing to promote the latest version of Internet Exploder, though. There’s a treasure hunt for $10,000 buried “online” (you have to use IE8 to find it, of course), and a donation of meals to charity (per IE8 download, of course).
Firefox has a new icon
New Firefox logo
Firefox is definitely the darling of the browser lot, so even a branding update—the fire, the fox, and the glossy globe are still intact and recognizable—is under magnified scrutiny.
Of course that’s not all there is to the next major release of Firefox, but I’m just glad they also care about their image. Lots of open source products pay little attention to the designery stuff. Firefox knows how to stay fresh and accessible to its audience without trying too hard (cough, see previous browser, cough).
Opera unites
Opera continues to innovate with its upcoming release, including an interface refresh from the same person who brought the Firefox logo to life. But it doesn’t stop there. Opera Unite cuts off the middleman for sharing photos, music, and all other kinds of files by turning the browser into a web server.
It’s not for everybody, but it’s a fascinating idea. An interesting twist to the “web as platform” concept. First there was web-based equivalents of desktop apps, as well as full-blown desktop interfaces on the web, then it was cloud computing, then it was the real-time web, then we have this. The jury’s still out on whether this will actually take off—considering Opera’s level of influence compared to the fox and the blue “e”—but any venture into Web 3.0 is a welcome effort. Here’s hoping we jump into it very soon.
But what is a web browser?
But apparently we can’t jump just yet. According to this discovery by The Next Web, the average internet user can’t tell the difference between a search engine and a browser, about 92% of those interviewed. Ironically, it was Google conducting the survey, and the final question was whether people knew that it had its own web browser.
Although Internet Explorer and Firefox were mentioned, people still didn’t know where the Web ended and the software began. It’s all just a blur of computer terms, which, at the end of the day, help them “find stuff”.
Knowing this, shouldn’t web browsers be scrambling to teach its users how the Internet works, including typing URLs into the address bar, and not just relying solely on search engines? Or should they just give up on the nth incarnation of the Browser Wars?
In the left corner: Tyler Tate’s 1KB CSS Grid, a lean framework sporting 14 classes and the familiar conventions for enforcing a visual grid via CSS.
In the right corner: Vladimir Carrer’s 1-line CSS Grid, an experimental framework sporting a single class to cut nested column widths in half. The solution is mindblowingly brilliant, but does it work? Design tends to work in thirds, not halves. You decide.
Whether or not it’s a coincidence I chanced upon these two extremely simple CSS grid frameworks just days apart, news of these two solutions makes the CSS framework “scene” a lot more interesting. And accessible. I can imagine many front-end developers shying away from heavyweight frameworks because there are too many features, most of which won’t be utilized, and there are too many conventions, most of which aren’t easy to remember.
I’m not even going to get into how using these frameworks leads to unsemantic, presentational class names and lots of <div> soup reminiscent of <table>-based layouts. Let’s just be glad people are streamlining the application of design principles for the Web, namely grid layouts. When a better way comes out—maybe it’ll be display:table, maybe it won’t—we’ll adjust then.
In the meantime, we need to let our arsenal evolve. Balance out the spectrum with lightweight frameworks like these. Then add diversity as well. Look at the Javascript libraries—the tiny moo.fx, the venerable Prototype and Scriptaculous, and the designer darling jQuery—each one caters to a specific need. What other kind of grid frameworks do we need? Fluid? Do-it-yourself? Highly reputable? Unobtrusive? Oh, what will they think of next?
One of the most ambitious efforts to come out of the Googleplex (or anywhere, really) in ages is Google Wave, a real-time messaging, sharing, and collaborating service unveiled last week. Finally, Google’s crack at the Real-Time Web. We’ve been waiting.
Google’s Real-Time Web
You might recall ReadWriteWeb proclaiming the big G missed the boat on that, as Twitter rules over real-time search these days. However, Wave makes one realize there is more to the real-time web than 140-character messages.
It’s a new way of doing things. It’s decentralized, open-source, and poised to take over online communications the way email has, since it’s built as a fundamental protocol. But it’s not even just “the new email”, it lets you do a lot more than that. It was built to service needs knowing the capabilities of the Web today:
Ezra Pound once wrote: “”The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” And elsewhere: “Make it new!”
Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn’t just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.
When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we’re at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it’s time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: “What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?”
This is not another reboot of the social network format the way Google redid email with Gmail and redid search with Google Search. But it does feel this is the way social interactions on the Web were supposed to be. Aren’t you tired of signing up over and over for the hottest new web service, OpenID/etc. not withstanding?
I love the diversity and downright chaos of the Internet, but the future has got to be seamless integration between all things. Text, photos, videos, blog posts, polls, calendars, petitions, lyrics, jokes, LOLcats, whatever.
Now when Google says real-time, it means your friend’s message appears on your screen by the character, instead of a “your friend is typing…” notice as you twiddle your thumbs. It also means you can reply to any part of your friend’s message, edit any part of a document, and replay exactly how everything happened when you’re done. See video above. It’s brilliant.
Terrifying ramifications?
That’s barely scratching the surface. I’m not sure if the protocol will succeed—not everybody lives in real-time online, or can handle this many features (see Twitter).
If it does succeed, it might become too successful that users are addicted, possibly trapped in this real-time space. We continue to blur the line between the real and the virtual, and even if at this point we can tell the difference between the two, will we ever reach the point of being “too” connected, transparent, hyperreal?
I’m not even sure if we should be trust yet another invention from Google—there has to be something in it for them, right?
Are you terrified yet? I think I am, but I’m pretty excited too.
Andy Clarke of For A Beautiful Web has presented a stylesheet for the web browser we haven’t been able to push off the provebial cliff: Internet Explorer 6.
When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.
That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.
But this idea is not new; this Universal IE6 CSS file contains just enough rules for a practically unstyled but easy to navigate website. You’re basically giving websites loaded in a low-fi browser a low-fi experience. Examples here, here, and here.
Despite its waning popularity, we seem to have amassed a whole buffet of solutions to the shortcomings of IE6, ranging from the hostile upgrade messages and campaigns to the subtle conditional stylesheets and scripts.
I can just imagine someone creating one of those personality quizzes out of this whole debacle: which IE6 compatibility fix are you? There’s an idea.
But really, dealing with IE6 and somesuch boils down to principle and circumstance. Can your clients and your conscience accept barely recognizable version of their sites in twentysomething percent of their audience? Is your sanity more precious than squishing mysterious bugs? Or do you feel like throwing some humor in?
Let me know if someone’s actually made a personality quiz about this; I’d love to take it.
Right now I’m listening to a live piano performance by Imogen Heap (she calls it “piano noodlings”) being broadcast over USTREAM, announced over Twitter a few minutes ago.
Several hundred other people are watching too, and it’s a new kind of musical experience thanks to the real-time Web. People have spoken of it before, and this is a fascinating aspect of it.
We can all sit down in front of the computer in our individual homes and listen to an Imogen Heap concert, live, together. It’s not quite the real thing, of course, but it’s different. Good different. It’s simple, spontaneous, and inclusive.
I can’t wait to see what other artists and other game-changers come up with in this next era of the Web.
Everything old seems to be new (and hip?) again. And I’m not too sure I’m happy about it.
Short URLs
Shorter URLs are all the rage these days because of Twitter and its 140-character limit. If you’re one of the top sites on the web is practically mandatory for you to roll out your own URL shortening system. Ars Technica, for example, whose official URL is arstechnica.com, also has arst.ch. If you’re on a CMS like WordPress, you’re advised to give out the post ID permalink instead of the keyword-rich permalink of your blog post for the same reason.
Not too long ago, SEO and usability experts were on the same side and recommended readable URLs. Now that Twitter is the new internet marketing (I think they call it social media now) battlefield, the rules changed. When the next killer Web 3.0 app comes out, will we compromise and adjust once again?
But then again, has the Web ever stood still? Maybe I just thought it was beginning to.
WebKit’s CSS animations and scrollbars
You can now style scrollbars and perform animations using CSS in WebKit browsers.
I remember when Internet Explorer started to support scrollbar styling and almost every personal site took advantage of it. But then they grew out of it and were told by the gurus not to mess with the browser chrome.
I also remember <blink> and <marquee>.
But then again, “styling scrollbars isn’t messing with the chrome anymore than styling a button is.” Would the world be a saner place if browsers behaved the same way and all looked alike?
DiggBars
Digg has come out with its own version of the external page framing mechanism which they call the DiggBar.
Said mechanism is nothing new, and never really died out even to be considered a comeback, but Digg has a powerful following by all that which is noisy in the blogosphere to build a considerable amount of buzz. And no matter how you look at it, framing external pages is still framing, reminiscent of the era when HTML framesets were considered cool.
But then again, perhaps in this new era listening to the clamor of the crowd is no longer a fluke, but a very real way to improve one’s business.
Here’s the conclusion that all the web gurus seem to have drawn over the past months: HTML5 is the future, and that future is slowly creeping into our midst. This article by Dave Shea is the latest proof of that. Then there are inspiration galleries and blogs dedicated to the use of HTML5 for markup, plus hardly any mention of XHTML2 anywhere else.
rel and more meaningful links
But I’m not going to get into the war between the two here; I’ll just focus on a specific development in the arena: link relations. There’s more to it than rel=stylesheet and rel=alternate. About a dozen more.
For example, the Google-imposed rel=nofollow will be officially added in HTML5, but the seemingly convenient rel=feed may be dropped due to browser implementation. Other interesting link relations mentioned are rel=search, which obviously points to a search page, and rel=sidebar, which refers to a document “shown in a secondary browsing context (if possible), instead of in the current browsing context.” More are being proposed here, including rel=accessiblity.
rel seems to be what plugins are to web browsers, so it’s interesting to see how they can make a markup language as extensible as possible.
rev and a less rotten web
Still related to link relations is the rev attribute, which stands for a “reverse link”. It hasn’t been as popular as its cousin rel up until microblogging boomed, and consequently, URL shorteners and the threat of link rot.
Considering just how popular Twitter is these days, particularly as a social media marketing and SEO tool where links are the mode of currency, using rev=canonical to indicate one URL is a shortened version of the other:
Google introduced rel="canonical" recently. It’s a way of pointing from an alternate URL back to the canonical URL of the current document: the relationship of the linked document to the current document is “canonical”.
If you’re linking from the canonical URL to an alternate URL (like, say, a shortened URL), you could use rev=”canonical”: the relationship of the current document to the linked document is “canonical”.
People are also advised to check long URLs at this RevCanonical app to determine whether they already contain shortened ones.
It’s April 9th somewhere around the world and that means it’s time for the annual CSS Naked Day. Just how elegant and semantic is your website’s markup? Stripping out your stylesheets will determine that. Good houses must have good foundations, and so must good sites.
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.
As an aside, I like that this ‘Day’ is arbitrarily stretched out to 48 hours instead of the usual 24 to accommodate locations all over the globe. I think more worldwide events and holidays should be more timezone-neutral.
We need more standards-focused advocacies like Blue Beanie Day, the countless kill IE6 websites, and this.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has just announced that members of the Internet Information Security Consortium (I2SecC) have discovered the real purpose of the infamous Conficker Worm, set to wreak havoc on millions of compromised systems on April 1st.
WaSP has also discovered that the best way to fight this malware is to ensure your websites are standards-compliant:
In order to ensure you do not fall victim to the worm’s botnet, I2SecC recommends immediate validation of the markup and supporting stylesheets for any Web site that you maintain and correcting any errors that are uncovered. As yet, it is unclear whether the worm will target sites that make use of non-standard DOM scripting; however, a message found by I2SecC researchers in an online forum believed to be from the worm’s creator or a close associate hints that it will: “your document.all are belong to us.”
April Fool’s! If only we could save the world from malware with web standards!
Conficker is very real, however, so please exercise caution today.
