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!

Related reading:

• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• The World Wide Web turns 20; time for an overhaul?
• Short URLs, WebKit’s CSS animations & scrollbars, DiggBars: everything old is new (and hip?) again
• Opera teaches good web design with its Web Standards Curriculum
• Do you still use URLs? Normal people no longer do

A nice follow up to the rendering news earlier this week.

Have you tested it? How does your design work with it?

Related reading:

• People don’t know what a web browser is (but first: IE, Firefox, & Opera updates)
• IE8 Renders Default By Default
• IE6 falls; XHTML2 cancelled.
• Google plays and promotes with Chrome Experiments (plus! browser updates)
• Yes, IE5 is Dead Already!

The what now? Default rendering modes? What? Ina Fried explains:

With IE8, Microsoft plans to have three rendering modes: the new standards-compliant mode, the IE7 rendering engine, as well as an option for displaying older Web sites. Because of the default shift, Web sites that want IE8 to use its IE7 engine will have to add a tag to their site’s code.

Word has it we’ll get an IE8 beta in a few months time. Maybe IE8 will be what finally kills IE6? Hardly.

Related reading:

• People don’t know what a web browser is (but first: IE, Firefox, & Opera updates)
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta Is Out
• IE6 falls; XHTML2 cancelled.
• Google plays and promotes with Chrome Experiments (plus! browser updates)
• Browser wars update: Firefox is up, IE is down, Google dumps IE6

9 years is serious time for a web browser. There is no excuse for IE5 to exist anymore.

Luckily, it just about doesn’t. On my Swedish sites I’ve got 0% IE5 visitors, and on the international ones it’s below 0.15%.

In other words, IE5 is dead. Now please kill IE6. Thank you.

Related reading:

• The IE6 funeral (is this goodbye for good?)
• The circus continues: Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
• Thank you, CSS3 Please!
• People don’t know what a web browser is (but first: IE, Firefox, & Opera updates)
• Opera teaches good web design with its Web Standards Curriculum

Clicking the PayPal link will reveal that the ransom money goes to cownapper@johncow.com, i.e. the John Cow fellow himself.

Brilliant or madness? I don’t know, it is great linkbait though, as the link spreads.

Scratch that, I think it’s silly. $100 to release the site? That’s undermining your own value to me, and that hurts your brand. Might be a fun way to try and earn some extra money, from a blog I guess, but I’d reckon asking for donations would work better.

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Outsourcing To The Rescue

Like in all sectors of the modern economy, outsourcing is becoming a major force to be reckoned with. And while I won’t go into detail about why I think the United States and Europe should stop freaking out about this phenomenon, it is clear that this could give the average freelancer a huge edge. Suddenly, you can cost effectively hire yourself a team when need be, but maintain your freelance status. It is like having temporary employees working for you, but only when you need them. The savings potential is massive and meanwhile you can pass yourself off as the most versatile freelancer out there.

But here is the dilemma: Should you tell your client that you outsourced a component of their project?

The Ethical Dilemma

You could easily not tell your client that you had to outsource a part of their project. Meanwhile, things go off without a hitch and everyone is happy. Unless of course something goes wrong with that piece and you don’t know how to service it. Then again, you could always outsource the fixing of the issue. The point is, this could continue and your client would never know the difference and you still look like the whiz kid.

Just like in any other economic sector, everyone will be reaping the benefits of this outsourcing. You will look like a true professional, your client will be happy about your relatively low prices (compared, to say, a boutique designer), and the end user will get that well designed, well functioning website that they came looking for. You aren’t necessarily obligated to tell anyone how your development process went.

Potential Pitfalls In Outsourcing

This is not to say that you won’t run into problems. The real issue will be finding a company to outsource to that is reliable and produces excellent results. There are tons of these services out there, located everywhere from India (where else) to Illinois and choosing the right one is no small task. In his ebook, Outsourcing Web Projects: 6 Steps to a Smarter Business, Dave Hecker puts it well:

“Remember that there are no barriers to entering the web development business. Any person from anywhere in the world can simply say “I’m a web developer” and start bidding on jobs. As a result, there are large numbers of inexperienced and unqualified vendors in the web design industry, and most of them lack the experience to execute your project properly”

Overall, outsourcing can be an invaluable tool for a web developer and is an option that should not be shrugged off. At the same time, you cannot ignore the potential problems and should always do some research about the company you are interested in. Either way, you can end up looking like a true professional. How do you feel about outsourcing your work?

This article was written by J David Macor.

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Webmasters are outraged over the recent change in Google’s policy, now specifically targetting what they refer to as “Link Schemes”:

Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links

Item #1, #2, and #4 have long been questioned as ethical behavior when it comes to using the hyperlink, all of them somehow gaining the reputation from webmasters and publishers who now largely consider them as inappropriate ways of link building. #1 though is always an after–effect of a hyperlink, be it positive or negative in an SEO context, unless when used with the rel="nofollow" attribute which is typically ignored by search engines. On the other hand, #3 is a different discussion altogether.

Changing the Web’s Nature

Google’s action is significantly questionable since it is posed to alter the way the world wide web behaves, something that already existed even before the birth of the search giant. In a way, it tries to take away our freedom to link meaningfully; your blogroll of friends who most likely are also linking to you is now a possible violation that could get you banned from the Google index!

Google’s Matt Cutts acknowledges the ramifications of their policy update, even suggesting that webmasters may do as they please, continue reciprocal linking and all, just as Google can have their way with regards to their index and the search results they produce. Though all of these actions are indeed meant to produce better results for their users, it is also irresponsible to pass the burden of weeding out unethical linking to the publishers themselves. In their effort to completely remove spam sites from their index, they are effectively asking for a change in behavior from the majority of users and publishers. It’s like regulating and telling us how to use an icepick since it can also be used to do bad things. So maybe my example was a little off, but you get my drift.

Information Monopoly

I think it’s now time for us to realize that Google has some sort of “information monopoly,” based on the fact that it is the preferred tool people use to find anything they need, now both online and even offline. It has too much power at its hands that no publisher or webmaster would dare Google’s ire, since a great deal of sites rely heavily on search engine traffic, in most cases, Google. To be fair, the search giant isn’t to blame since none of its competitors have provided compelling technology to suggest a trend that moves toward a democratized search market. At the end of the day, almost everyone will still be using Google for almost everything they do.

With this in mind, all the more do we need a more understanding Google, we need it to practice its “don’t be evil” mantra pro–actively without adversely affecting those who always try to play fair.

Nurturing Responsible Publishers & Webmasters

Taken in a positive context, though Google’s move may appear over–zealous, their actions should help nurture a more responsible breed of publishers and webmasters. By suggesting that we do as we please, they may be daring us to behave within the bounds of what we think is right, with or without reciprocal linking or the other schemes they cited. By doing so, they can adjust accordingly and learn what parameters to give weight on and what to disregard, to produce the most appropriate search results and discard what shouldn’t be there. However, the process may not be straightforward, it is likely that many of us publishers may be affected in the short–term. And the bad ones weeded out in the long run.

It’s gonna be rough, but what choice do we really have? In the end, both users, publishers, and webmasters will benefit from all this. Hopefully.

Written by Markku Seguerra, rebelpixel.com.

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Stop using IE hacks on your sites and let them see the ugly side of IE6. Eventually, they will find a better browser (ie. Firefox) or at least upgrade to newer version of IE.

Do you agree?

With all due respect to Nick, and as frustrated as I am, I think this is a rather short-sighted and selfish approach. Sure it’s a royal pain to put in conditional CSS statements and PNG hacks because IE6 doesn’t understand PNG transparency, but do we really think that just leaving out the hacks so that users see the “ugly side of IE6″ will convince them to upgrade their browsers? No, it won’t. I’ll tell you what it will do: it will make them head for the back button quicker than you can say “Bill Gates”, and on to a competitor’s site who IS customer/reader focused and who understands that many of these people who are still on IE6 don’t even realize they need to upgrade. They may not even have a choice, as they surf the internet during their lunch at a company stuck in the dark ages, or they might even know there is a newer version out there, but haven’t the slightest clue as to how to install it.

Obviously, there are some conditions under which you could easily drop the hacks:

• the site’s target audience/customer is tech savvy.
• your stats tell you that only a small percentage of your audience is still on IE6. Who cares if close to 40% of people are still in the browser dark ages. The only stat that matters is what browser your visitors are using.
• leaving out the hack isn’t going to disrupt the user experience that much anyway.

If you don’t want to have to deal with all those hacks, then don’t design a site that uses transparent PNGs or requires conditional CSS. I’m as frustrated as the next person with the snail-like pace at which people are upgrading their browsers, but it’s just part of the job. We’re not designing web sites for US, we’re designing sites for THEM. What are some other ways we can push people to upgrade?

This article was written by Randa Clay. Read more about design, marketing, blogging, branding and all things creative at RandaClay.com.

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The Web 2.0 world seems to have a problem regarding traffic. It seems to be the measure of success for a website and because of this many sites either get unnoticed or their true value doesn’t really show. On the other hand you have sites the receive a large amount of traffic yet really do nothing for anyone so how does traffic play in these situations? Finally, there is no end-all solution for measuring traffic so anyone can throw out some numbers and who are we to call them out on it or not because it wouldn’t be too hard to find a program that makes those numbers look realistic.

Let’s explore a couple of scenarios.

1. You have a site that gets 10,000 uniques per day, yet you generate no revenue and almost no discussion. Does the site have the same value as the person doing 5,000 uniques per day and making $1500 a month along with having some great discussions?

2. 2 million uniques a month is nothing to sneeze at, but what if you breakdown what those 2 million uniques really mean? What if those uniques were distributed over 150 sites? When you first think about it, it still seems like a big number but look a little deeper.

• 2,000,000 / 150 = 13,333 uniques per month per site
• 13,333 / 30 = 444 uniques per day per site

Now how many sites do you know do at least 444 uniques per day? I was able to make the 2,000,000 into 444 through two simple calculations. That doesn’t mean the 2M isn’t an important number, but you have to be careful of how you use it.

3. One site does over 2 million pageviews a month. That is a ridiculously high number for a single site whether your ego wants to admit it or not. However, what if I were to tell you that over 1 million uniques visit the site every month as well, would you still be as impressed? Again, 1 million uniques is nothing to sneeze at, but you would hope that a site can do more than 2:1 ratio when it comes to PVs and uniques.

Now take into account another factor with example #3. There are plenty of sites that do more traffic, but do those sites pull in an average of $60,000 per month? Looking at that stat would you take a site that does 2M uniques and 5M PVs or the site above that does half that and pulls in the money?

9rules isn’t known for throwing our members millions of visitors a month, but we are known for giving them quality traffic that sticks around and many times subscribes to their sites. You can get on Digg one day and jump up 20,000 pageviews and the next day its all back to normal again because the quality of the traffic is meaningless.

Traffic should be used as a metric to view how well your site is doing against your own expectations and how it can be improved. Throwing out random numbers doesn’t always mean they are worthwhile, yet we have put ourselves in an age where the size of your traffic is the only thing that counts (insert size isn’t everything joke). Traffic does have meaning, but don’t make it the theme of your site.

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Developing traffic is a fine art on the web. Sometimes we get lost in the fact that just because it is easy to build a website it does not mean that it will be easy for people to find it. When it comes to personal sites, maybe it is not your goal to have a large amount of traffic come through your site, but for almost every other site in existence, the site will need traffic to survive. The question then becomes how does one go about developing traffic for their website?

Getting Linked

The best way (and one of the hardest) is to get linked to by other sites. Once you are linked by someone else and that site has more than 2 visitors you will more than likely receive a small boost in traffic. However, keeping that traffic is another story altogether. Of course no one will link to you if it is not worth their time. They are trying to enrich the content of their site so if a link to your site does nothing for them, well then don’t expect a link.

Of course for someone to link to you they have to know that your site exists. So what are you to do about this situation?

Comments, Linking, Forums, and Email

These are not guaranteed ways, but they do usually provide some success. The first one involves simply commenting on other people’s sites or in forums where signatures are allowed. The key here though is to post an insightful comment where people will be interested to find out more about you. “Awesome idea!” is the kind of comment that people will quickly bypass. Don’t get me wrong, I love these kinds of comments, but the chances of someone clicking on your name drops. I think I click on links within comments more than I do links within an entry.

In forums the more popular people in the community have sites that become well-known because they are associated with the people and therefore gain respect.

The second method involves including links to other sites, be it within an entry or a blogroll. I can only speak from my own experience, but I often check my referrer logs and if I notice a new link pointing to my site I will always check it out. It’s always fun to find that diamond in the rough on the web. Technorati and trackbacks/pingbacks have made life a bit easier in finding the sites that link to you. People love compliments.

If you think you really have a great article I wouldn’t hesitate to email other sites in your genre to let them know about it. This can only happen every so often as most people will grow tired of reading about your next great thing. However, great content deserves great coverage, but don’t fall into the trap thinking that all of your content is great enough to spam people.

Link Exchanges

Many sites make deals where they will post each others links on their sites. This can be either good or useless. If the site linking to you gets absolutely zero traffic then a link might be useless and only benefitting that individual. Also if their link to you is in a place where no one will find it then it again becomes useless. When doing a link exchange do not expect the person to always be so helpful for you. Work a deal where both parties will benefit.

According to some people Google blacklists “link farms” whose sole purpose is to just provide links to other site without offering anything useful on their site. You may encounter emails from individuals looking to exchange links only to find they will put you on a page that already contains hundreds of links. I haven’t encountered this type of situation in a very long time, but still get the occassional email for 9rules to join a link exchange.

Traffic Generators

A technique that I have yet to try and more than likely never will for any site I create is using traffic generators. These types of sites guarantee that they will send you X amount of people for Y amount of dollars. The problem with these are that most of the time the traffic is generated through pop-unders and if you are like me you close those windows quicker than they appear.

Advertising

Depending on the site and the type of ad you use advertising is still an effective means to developing traffic.

Email Signatures

Do you use email? If so, why not include your url at the bottom. It won’t bring you thousands of visitors, but all you need is one person to start spreading the news.

Content Still Wins

Popular sites are popular due to their great content. It’s a simple formula that always works. However, you have to get people to your site to see the great content and you should have some success if you follow the methods outlined above. The line seems to be divided on whether submitting your own content to Digg and Reddit is “ethical” or not, but again I feel if the content is warranted then by all means don’t hesitate in promoting it. These sites will provide a great boost in traffic, but won’t keep it so what you present to your incoming readers is what determines whether they will come back or not.

If you know the basics of SEO for your site you should be fine in pushing that to the back of your mind. Once you get caught up in trying to play the SEO game you lose focus on what will make your site great and that is the content that is on their. SEO will take care of itself and relying on organic search engine is a fool’s game to play. Just keep producing the content and the traffic will flow if you follow the advice above.

Once you have the traffic you can begin to work on developing a community within your site.

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