10 Tips for Investing in Domain Names

1. Attempt to Predict the Future

You may not have the genius of renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil who has been hired by Bill Gates on numerous occasions just to talk, but you can still predict the future of the domain industry. By the time a child born today graduates from college, Kurzweil believes that poverty, disease, and reliance on fossil fuels will be a thing of the past. Ray bases his predictions on the exponential growth in the power of technology, or as he calls it–the Law of Accelerating Returns. We can apply futuristic predictions to valuable domain name investments. Think outside of the box; education & technology, information syndication, social networking, robotics, alternative energy…you get the picture.

2. Stick With the “Dot Com”

This suggestion could be argued, but generally successful investors and domaining old schoolers will tell you that they will put their money on “.com” remaining at the top of the food chain for quite awhile. If you get in the market early for a popular ccTLD (country code top level domain) like .us, .tv, etc.; you may be able to snag a great name. The risk factor for “.com” is significantly less than the other extensions. Maybe we should ask Kurzweil what he thinks.

3. Keep it Short and Sweet

In the world of domains, generally speaking; 2 letter names are a fool’s dream; 3 letter names are king; 4 letter non-sense names are an easy sale; 5 letter names bank a small fortune. You would, however, be hard pressed to find any of those to add to your portfolio. My best suggestion to you is not to stray past two words within a domain name. Memorability, ease of typing and visual aesthetics play a big part in a domain’s value.

4. Keep it Brandable

Make sure the words you choose in your domain flow well together; repeat your name aloud several times to see how it sounds spoken. Ask your friends and family what their first impression of your name choices are. Does your name relate well to the industry or audience the website would be targeting?

5. Keep it Real

We have all seen them, invented names or characters mashed together that form pronounceable syllables–Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Tumblr. While many popular websites today have done well with these odd brand names it would be hard to market a cheaper version of these names to anyone, which brings me to my next point…

6. Have a Buyer in Mind

Before investing your money into a domain name, ask yourself a few questions about your future buyer. Would anyone want to buy this domain name today? What niche industry or population could I market this name to? Is this domain relevant to a small business industry, a single person or a large movement? The more potential buyers the better.

7. Don’t Spend More than Current Value

Do your homework. Research aftermarket domain sales portals such as Sedo, TDNAM, Afternic as well as domain forums for current sales prices of similar names. You can get a good idea of the value of your domain and some insight into how its value may mature in the future. I suppose there can be some exceptions to this tip if you’re Mr. Moneybags and find a name you are just sure is going to be a hit.

8. Don’t Sell Until it’s Ripe

Imagine you’re at the 1923 World Series and Babe Ruth tosses your baseball back to ya with his name jotted down in fresh black ink. A friend of a friend of your second cousin offers you $50 bucks for the ball a week later… you simply don’t sell your green bananas! The amount of people logging on to the internet and developing their own websites increases tremendously each year. If you think you’ve got a keeper, do just that.

9. Develop Relevant Content

Search Engines today are a key element to driving traffic to our names and essentially allow certain websites to be discovered. There are vast amounts of information and domain names that are essentially hidden to the world simply because webmasters do not take the steps to publish and promote quality information. If nothing else, setup a Wordpress blog script on your domain name and regularly publish relevant content to your domains.

10. Nurture Your Name

Incoming unique visitors, Google’s PageRank, backlinks and web reputability can add significant value to any domain. While publishing current events and related content to your domain name, manually submit your site to quality web directories. Social networks such as MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon and Bumpzee can also add reputation and send visitors to your name.

Source : http://www.dotsauce.com/

Options for Website Development

As it turns out, there are many different options available. In fact, there are as many options available as there are websites on the net. But a few stick out as particularly good approached for you to consider. This article will review three strategies for getting your website up and running. In reality, there are countless subcategories within each strategy but this overview should give you a good start to begin your planning.

The first strategy is also the cheapest. You can use the Joomla CMS Web Application Framework to build your website. Joomla is an open source project, meaning it was developed by loosely affiliated developers around the world and it’s free to use. Yes, you read it correctly. It’s absolutely free for anyone to use. You simply download the platform and install it on your server and you’re good to go. There are also countless extensions you can download and install, upholstery cleaning richmond the functionality of your website. The beauty of the platform is that you can log on at any time and make changes or adjustments to your website, all by yourself. Joomla is a powerful content management system and you can quickly put up a feature-rich website without paying a penny.

Read More Article...

Web Development Tips For Contact Forms

The purpose behind the creation of a website is to get people to know about you and to contact you for business purpose. The only point of contact for your website visitors to visit your site and contact you is to go to the contact form and fill in their queries. Hence, it is extremely essential that your contact form be well designed and quite impressing too. Here are some important tips that will be helpful in the development of your contact form.

The first thing that you need to realize about web development of a contact form is to make sure that it is not too long or consists of irritating questions. Keep the web development of the contact form simple . Do not complicate it too much, as people do not like to think when it comes to website surfing. They look for fast and immediate actions.

Many websites restrict their query space text box with character limits. This is incorrect. If the user is not able to file in his complete query there is a possibility that he will get irritated and will not file in anything at all. If your contact form web development can not allow query submission beyond a certain extent, it is advised that you provide a file uploading option, where the user can upload his query file wherein, he can add as many queries as he wants.

Make sure that your web development for Contact forms has made use of Captcha readability. This is the only way you can restrict the SPAM submissions in the contact form. Do not forget to develop your thank you page. The thank you page is a very important page in contact form development. From the user's point of view, if this page is not visible, the user cannot confirm if his query has been successfully submitted or not. Hence make sure that you develop a complete contact form with an encouraging and assuring message in the page that will tell the users that you will revert to their query.

Once your contact form web development is complete do not forget to do a complete QC testing of the form. This is the most important stage of the entire project. The testing should be done keeping the user in mind and ensure that there is no loose thread in the development. Check all the messages, codes and the final appearance of form to cross check all the details.

About the Author- Naman Jain is an online marketing professional, Presently working with Rupiz Media, one of the leading online marketing company offering expert UK web development services and website designing solutions over the globe.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Best Website Development Tips

You can get high rankings and increase web traffic to your site by doing the following steps. Not following our advice on any tip will result in lower rankings on some search engines. Please contact us if you need to know "the why" to the below statements:

• Research what keywords people use most often on search engines that pertain to your products or services; use these keywords as text in the design to increase website traffic.
• "Keep It Simple" - 99% of all web designers use too many graphical images and programs like Java, Flash, etc. which results in lower rankings and less traffic..
• Web pages, like a spread sheet, are made using cells and tables. Use as few cells and tables in your web design as possible.
• Create good Meta Tags. Each page should have different keywords in the Title and the Description Meta Tag.
• Limit the number of times that you repeat words in your Keyword Meta Tag.
• Place your important keywords at the top of the page as text headers.
• Your most important page and keywords should be on the first page of a website.
• Frames based websites should only be used for Intranet (a site only for company employees) and not for Internet.
• Do NOT include pages that re-direct (a page that automatically sends you to another page) people to other pages.
• Run an analysis program to count the number of times keywords are used in the first 7500 characters of computer code.
• Limit your use of services that automatically submits your URL to the top 10 search engines.
• When finished with a page, run a spell checking program and then compress the html code.
• Keep track of your search engine rankings and website traffic.
• Once a website is indexed, a good web designer should go back and improve pages that didn't get high rankings on key words.
• Every 3 months you should make a small change on each web page. Search engines like to see that changes are being made to a site and that it just isn't sitting there for years with no upgrades.

Why Web Designers Don't Follow The Above Tips

• Time is money. Most web designers bid on projects and know it takes at least 30% more time to create a site that gets high rankings. Since most companies / people don't know what should be done to get an increase in website traffic, web designers cut corners and only design a website that the customer sees is appealing.
• Most web designers haven't taken the time to learn how to get high rankings on multiple search engines.
• Many web designers don't care about getting high rankings, as it's not fun and creative work.
  

Source : http://www.high-higher-highest-rankings.com/

Tips to find great web design, development services

Consumer confusion is the result of many individual problems when it comes to website design and development services, but in a nutshell, it boils down to the rapid growth of the Web and the lack of competitive measure available. Here are ten tips to lay that confusion to rest.

Molly E. Holzschlag

Waking up from a snooze on the way to Australia recently, I chatted a bit with my seatmate over prelanding tea. This well-dressed Englishman's work is to purchase a variety of IT services, and his company has a wide variety of needs and concerns. During our conversation, it became clear that, while he was aware of industry buzz terms such as Ajax and Web 2.0, he admittedly had little idea what they really meant, nor how to find top-quality Web design and development services and solutions for a fair price.

As we chatted, it became crystal clear to me, as a long-time educator and advocate for professional integrity and best practices in Web development and design, that the buyers of services-the consumers, if you will-have been getting short shrift for a very long time. If I had one valid HTML page for every confused client who's told me something akin to "We paid for the most expensive of the three companies, and it turns out the least expensive is cleaning up the mess they made of our site," I could hand you back a very tidy Web.

Consumer confusion is the result of many individual problems when it comes to website design and development services, but in a nutshell, it boils down to the rapid growth of the Web and the lack of competitive measure available. There are few college degrees in the field and there's little to no relevant professional certification. Even fewer people are capable of measuring a company's quality against any professional standards since the entire field lacks that measure, at least for now.

In an effort to assist CIOs and other technology buyers who are required to make seemingly blind decisions as clearly as possible, I offer the following 10 tips. I hope that folks such as my seatmate on that flight will suffer fewer stumbles and greater wins when purchasing Web design services.

Read More Article...