The 2014 Cyber Land Rush

Land Rush on New Domain Extensions – 2014

It’s a new age for a new land rush, as ICANN has authorized a long list of new global domain name extensions for public consumption.

Recently, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has released a whole bunch of new gTLD (global Top Level Domain) extensions to the general public.  Most of these have been out for a little while, but I have been so busy that I didn’t have time to post.  There will be a whole bunch more to follow these, as well.  So we still are just around almost halfway through the release of this new variety of extensions.

Obviously some great names are gone.  Lots of domainers often automate the task of registering the names they want.  I personally think that some domainers (who are much better off than I) go a bit overboard because they can afford to.  You aren’t going to sell domains on a regular basis unless you have a large stock of generic names, though.

Still, I believe that the .com extension will win out as the best domain name extension to have in the US simply for a long time yet, because people here aren’t used to using anything else.  As United States citizens, we don’t even bother to register .US versions of our own beloved brands much of the time.  To me, that is a huge oversight.

But I did manage to grab a few myself, including…

• motorcyclist.club
• device.tools
• handheld.tools
  and to strengthen my brands:
• hostmaster.domains
  (to back-up our www sub domain and name)
• premiumbrand.domains
  and
• sitename.domains
  (because I can’t have “site.domains” even though my Trademark is Site Domains, and I have  sitedomains.com, sitedomains.us, sitedomainnames.com, sitedomainnames.us and sitedn.com protecting it, but certain ‘generic’ words are unavailable – which seems unfair when it is my TM and I have the .com as well as most of the other extensions).

There are some good ones out there, I’m planning on getting more, but I am actually scrambling to protect my current brands.  The new domains are a bit more expensive, so we have to be selective.  But this land rush seems to be

The new list of extensions supposedly allows everyone a chance of getting a good domain name.  It would be just too hard for all the domainers to snap every good name up, but be sure that most of the generics are gone.  That’s just a fact of life in this day and age.

Some of the generic names just aren’t even available.  As I mention above, site.domains isn’t available to anyone, even though I have personally created the Site Domains Trademark and built a great brand behind it.  What is crazy to me is that everyone in the domainer community shunned me for grabbing sitedomains.com, saying that it wasn’t very good, catchy or short enough.  But now I supposedly can’t register the .domains version and capitalize on my investment?

So, the rules are a little different with this new flood of gTLD (global Top Level Domain) extensions.  The real benefactor in the short run, is ICANN, who is cashing in on already established brands while we little guys try to protect our brands.  After all, it only takes a nut to grab an extension and deface the brand in order to build any notoriety and ill-will directed squarely at the brand.

The new list of available extensions is actually quite long and adding them all to the drop down extensions menu would make that search utility less effective.  So the best thing to do is, in the registration search field, enter the domain name, a dot (period) and then extension that you wanted to check.  It is probably a the easiest to do it, and more self explanatory, from the shop.domainhostmaster.com subdomain of Domain Hostmaster, though.

I’ll be adding info on the new extensions into the http://www.domainhostmaster.com section soon, under a new gTLD  directory (www.domainhostmaster.com/new-gtld/) as soon as possible (I have been working a great deal, lately).

Here is the current list of the new extensions ready for registration at Domain Hostmaster: 

New Extensions List

.camera
.media
.photos
.photography
.pictures
.exposed
.graphics
.gallery
.webcam
.productions
.lighting

.exchange
.trade
.bargains
.cheap

.computer
.support
.systems
.domains
.directory
.club
.bar
.pub
.social
.buzz
.email
.zone
.cool
.dating
.singles

.bike
.watch
.diamonds
.glass
.parts
.toys

.works
.agency
.company
.associates
.partners
.enterprises
.industries
.international
.foundation
.holdings
.ventures
.capital
.estate
.land
.lease
.house
.condos
.villas
.farm
.properties
.management
.careers
.marketing
.consulting
.guru
.expert
.engineering
.services
.solutions
.technology
.equipment
.supply
.supplies
.tools

.training
.education
.academy
.university
.institute
.community
.center
.town
.events
.tips
.reviews
.report
.today
.wiki

.holiday
.vacations
.voyage
.cruises
.flights

.glass
.coffee
.vision
.solar
.democrat
.catering
.cleaning
.florist
.ninja
.camp
.rest
.fish
.recipes
.rentals
.clothing
.kitchen
.plumbing
.contractors
.construction
.builders
.limo
.cab
.shoes
.dance
.cards
.bid
.ink
.uno
.gripe
.xyz
.futbol
.maison
.tienda
.viajes
.immobilien
.kaufen
.reisen
.moda

I’ll follow-up later, I am still very busy.  But there will be many more added soon, ICANN has a lot of new ones coming.

Remember that if you decide to do business with me at Domain Hostmaster, it will be highly appreciated!   😉   Plus, we quite honestly do offer the best prices around, the best management control panels, the best servers and network operations center available (on several continents), and the best support staff in the industry.

Thanks so much.   Have fun domaining!

Web Page Titles/Names

If you are using one of the latest browsers on your PC, or browse the web on a mobile device, it is very likely that you don’t even see the name of the page your current browser window is displaying.

Why?

Web page titles and even their filenames are important assists in helping your site’s web pages search. By providing a unique title and name that reflects the content found on that particular document, you are providing more meta data to the search engines. If your title/name meta data are accurate for each page, this optimizes search. And we optimize the ability for searching the page, we optimize search for the entire website.

I would think that by optimizing search, the search engines might even be more likely to rank your site’s page higher in the search results. This is the general idea behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO), providing optimized data to enhance your listing’s rankings in the search engine results (often referred to as SERP for your ‘Search Engine Ranking Position’ or ‘Search Engine Results Positioning’).

Yet as I surf the web, it seems to me that more and more I am running across pages that are completely untitled, or all the pages in a website share the company name, or are simply titled and named inappropriately (home, page 1, page 2, page 3…). I have even seen many that are labelled “Untitled”, which seems to be the default name that WYSIWYG web page editors use.

But if you look at how we use the web nowadays, it doesn’t seem unrealistic that this is so unimportant to so many. People in the know understand fully how important these names and titles can be when it comes to optimizing search, because these particular fields, even the filename, are concise representations of what might be found on that page, and therefore, words that appear there, as well as are repeated elsewhere throughout the description, headings, content and image descriptions (maybe even in the image file names), are given more importance in search.

Because the title and name of a page usually use concise wording, even most of the very basic search algorithms place even more importance on the few words found here. And when there are fewer words used, their importance is greater for each word there, because importance is less spread-out when they are concise, as opposed to a certain importance spread between more of them.

That, by the way, is how some SEO professionals think, and I completely disagree, that using more key search words is good.  It is much better to be concise and concentrate on the keywords and terms that are your focus.  These can be underlined with synonyms and such in the content, but to stuff keywords in a title or filename, even in a description or keywords list (within meta tags) is just not a good idea.  But that is a different subject, overusing names and titles.  I just want to encourage their practical use, and even all of the major search engines like to see this, too.  It’s called paying attention to the details.

Of course, any modern advanced search technology uses much more refined algorithms, but it always starts right there, with each page’s own name and title. Why do so many overlook them and their importance to search?

My answer is that the new modern web browsers are making it less important.

When I am browsing the web on my PC these days, I am in productivity/creativity mode, and I usually only have a single web browser window open. But that one browser window is full of tabs showing all sorts of different webpages for all the different online projects I am working on.

Often, I have a tab open for the font creation tool I am currently utilizing. Another for each of my different hosting accounts I manage. Another for my WordPress blog, one tab for Blogger and yet another for Tumblr. I usually always have my Twitter and Facebook accounts readily available, as well.

On top of that I will have the websites open that I am working on, and the next ones I want to touch-up, as well. Because we can do that with modern browsers on a fairly recent machine that has some processing power and enough memory.

So, what do I see as the title of each page in these tabbed windows? Well, since the current open tab is not enhanced above the individual tabs (as it should be) in Chrome or FireFox, I see:

[In] [In] [W] [S-] [Pr] [H] [H] [Sh] [D] [g] [W] [Bl] [T]…

Reduced size screen snapshot of my browser tabs. Chrome shows a letter, maybe 2. FireFox shows a word, maybe 2 short ones. But both are ignoring the current active title, as well as all the others.

It is the modern web browser that is masking how important those Titles are!

If the title of the page isn’t even displayed in the current active browser window, this is a huge burden in educating users the importance of the proper use of the HTML title tag. Especially when Google is declaring that what is the most important thing to it is that their search results are reflecting what the visitor actually sees and is presented with upon arrival to that document.

Isn’t Google itself devaluating these titles in Chrome?

Interestingly enough, your PC or Mac web browser’s address bar is still there by default and yet most users and even many webmasters are ignoring its importance. Site administrators, owners and webmasters ignore it with non-related domain name choices and even more poorly thought-out directory organization and file naming conventions.

However, the issue does not stop there. Because screen space is so important on smart phones and handheld devices, the page title doesn’t appear unless we are switching between different page views. In fact, the web browser’s address bar disappears as soon as we scroll down the page a little. That said, as soon as we start scrolling up, it will reappear, reaffirming its importance to navigation. But I honestly don’t think that anyone understands that importance, because I find myself frustrated not having a gadget that represents the browser bar there for me to tap and access.

My differences in UI (user interface) design vary greatly from the mobile plaftform, though. I believe in visual clues that allow navigation. Unfortunately, the mobile UI is very unfriendly in this respect. So although you do have elderly people adopting smart phones, I find them even more frustrated with the expected UI experience because they are expecting a GUI and not the touch motion technology that mobile users have to learn.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges of humans interacting with mobile device interfaces, it remains clear that Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s FireFox are abandoning the display of the all important web page title unless you actually look for it. So now is it becoming just meta data?

I have to ask myself why, and I really do think that they too, are sick of seeing unused or inappropriate HTML document titles. Since the webmastering public at large doesn’t use the title tags correctly, why should they even display them, I suppose?

But doesn’t this start down a new slippery slope where we don’t even worry about our page titles because they are so out-of-sight and therefore out-of-mind?

Or are they actually going to give SEO professionals a reason to stick around because as always, all they have ever done is tackle the obvious that a newbie webmaster or newbie web designer without a clue would miss?

Nevertheless, despite their somewhat inappropriate disappearing act from the full view of the global world wide web community, web page titles and names do have a proven impact on assisting search. So it is then obvious that these things really do require your attention when designing a website, setting up a new page, posting a new blog entry, etc…

Just remember that each name and title reinforces the key search words/terms, advertising copy and even the brands themselves that are represented on these pages and it all makes common sense, doesn’t it?

In example…   If you are creating a page about the different kinds of rodent traps, you might want to name your web page HTML file as “rodent-traps.html” and title it “Rodent Traps for the Home”.  Then, on that page you would discuss the different kind of traps available for different kinds of rodents.  Use head tags to identify different kinds of content.  Then, you will link to pages about particular traps or brands… so maybe you have another page discussing Rat Traps at “rat-traps.html” and it may discuss the differences between poison traps, concussion traps and sticky traps, then each of those may point to reviews on particular brands of traps at other pages showcasing those brands or products.

I can go into more detail, but to me this is all common sense.  Of course, I am a well educated web designer, as well as an artist.  I’m supposed to understand this stuff.  But not all webmasters do, and so that’s why I want to reintroduce some of these common sense practices to the world, because when a page title or name disappears, we think about these little beginning design touches a lot less, and yet they are very important to the grand scheme of search.

I don’t preach Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I preach search optimization (which has a better effect on SERP because you eliminate the worry).

Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza

Yahoo has decided to release some of its premium domain names to the public through an auction at Sedo…

Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)

This premium domain name portfolio auction started today, November 14th, and runs to November 21st, 2013.  Although there are quite a few names that I feel are not very good (especially for the reserve price indicated), there are some great domains in the bunch…

• AV.com
• WebServer.com
• Sandwich.com
• Sled.com
• VoiceMail.com
• Crackers.com
• Freeby.com/.net
• BlogsPort.com (or brand it as BlogSport.com)

Now, please note that the above is merely a sampling of some of the best domain names in the Yahoo Domainapalooza premium domain portfolio auction.  But that portfolio is listing over 500 names on its first day, and Yahoo! also indicates that it will also be adding even more domain names throughout the auction.

Can you walk away with a great brandable domain name that you could develop into a profitable website or business?  Very likely, considering the quality of some of these names.  Especially with names that have an excellent second meaning.  For instance, even though winter is coming and sled would make a great name to sell winter snow sleds, “sled” is often how I refer to older muscle cars that had great power but lacked the handling of a sports car.  These beasts will never have sports car handling because they double as grocery-getters and transportation to work.  And if you are into muscle cars like I am you would see the opportunity in that street rod slang name.

As of this writing, there are 517 domain names available for auction and with Yahoo planning to add even more this may become the most watched premium domain name portfolio auction in history.

Happy domaining!  I hope there will be many domainers taking advantage of this opportunity to add to their portfolio and domainate the market with domainating names.  😉

Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)

-Doug
…”Domainating”
(I’m going back to check out that list!)

Swamped!

Right now I’m just making a quick post because I am swamped with things to do after my web host finally shut-off my services (and did I ask them to shut off my hosting and stop charging me for it, SIX MONTHS AGO).

I’ve been documenting what I’m doing to get caught-up at http://www.Blare.Info/ – but I have a long way to go, yet, and I better get some sleep before I go into work again tonight.

I thought this freelancing stuff meant I would have FREE Time, but NO!

Busy as a Bee…

I’ve been so busy updating domain names and websites. I have a bad host that is costing Me a great deal for the account. I really liked the hosting, even though they were so expensive, until they made a big deal about my Top Sites script and shut down the site.  That’s the one I was paying them to handle.  I can get all sorts of other hosts to handle the other domains at almost no cost to Me.

What sites have I been updating? I’ve been trying to get lots of domains and websites moved off the old host. So I’m not doing too much. But here’s a list:

http://www.4gz.net/
http://www.4gz.us/
http://www.abitofallright.com/ – Actually, I messed this one up. I still have to go back and fix the a names.
http://www.adgtw.com/
http://www.adtda.com/
http://amanshomeishiscastle.com/
http://automotivesalvageyards.com/
http://www.derivant.com/
http://www.designerartist.com/
http://www.domainance.com/
http://www.domainants.com/
http://www.domainperfection.com/
http://www.poetlike.com/
http://www.superelegance.com/

Aside from moving them off that expensive server so that I can close that web hosting reseller account, I am trying to get these sites to look good on a mobile phone screen. Let me know if I need to address any particular site. I actually have a Droid X with an HD aspect screen that most websites actually look pretty good on.

BApps.com up for Auction

BApps.com is available for sale to the highest bidder at Sedo.

BApps.com Listing @ Sedo

This domain WILL BE SOLD at auction as the reserve price has been met.

The auction for BApps.com will conclude on May/05/11 @ 05:51 AM Eastern Standard Time.

When the nameservers are reset by the new owner (or the transfer authority @ Sedo), the old blog will expire.  It could be replaced by another should the new owner want one at the same old address, but that, of course, will all be up to the new registrant.

I have moved a couple posts to blog.widgetdroid.com and most of the rest I have moved here to domainating.com.  Still updating a few with Categories and Post Tags.

Soo-Foo.com Sold

I finally received my $600.0o check from Network Solutions’ Certified Offer Service for the sale of Soo-Foo.com, yesterday.  I had been awaiting this payment for quite some time and the whole transaction was mired with delays.  I am certainly glad to have finally received this payment, although I now know to charge more per sale if I ever get a an offer through this service ever again.  Although NetSol offered me $600.00 and paid me exactly $600.00 for Soo-Foo.com, this sale was well over a month in the making and once the transfer of the domain name had been completed and verified, it still took over 10 days for them to process the payment, issue a check and for me to receive it.  Heck, I had it transferred over to NetSol within 5 days.

The main problem is that NetSol only looks after itself, not its customers.  They use every trick in the book in order to screw their clients.  Once the transfer is complete and verified, the payment is authorized for processing.  Except even then, once the transfer has been completed and verified by Friday, the payment isn’t actually issued until the checks are printed the following week, on Thursday.  Talk about a racket, NetSol has purposely structured everything in order to give everyone else the shaft.  Obviously no one gets their check until next week, so NetSol is sitting on this payment an unusually long time before the funds are ever deducted from their bank account.

Every other domain name broker or sales service is paying the seller immediately upon a successful transfer verification through PayPal or the user’s set payment method.  That means that I would be paid on the very same day, anywhere else.  It just shows what an evil attitude NetSol uses in conducting business.  They really have no sense of fairplay at all.

Note also that Network Solutions uses the very same contract for every single one of its customers.  The same contract covers domain name sales of any type, and is extended to be overly and dramatically long to cover the specifics of each and every domain name extension, and all other legal speak, as well.  It also covers its web hosting, design services, along with anything and everything else it could ever thing of selling or taking commissions on.  The contract itself is a breach of contract by its very design as a way to buck the first law of business, because it fails to constitute any attempt to do business fairly by any stretch of the imagination.  NetSol’s conglomerated contract is unrealistic to any consumer, or anyone else that NetSol does business with, and is purposely meant to create confusion and make the reader give-up on making sense of the crap.

Obviously, NetSol hasn’t changed.  It’s this crappy “holier-than-thou” corporate law attitude with virtually no support  and complete lack of social responsibility that made me become my own domain name registrar at Domain Hostmaster.  Unlike NetSol, we take pride in delivering extremely low prices and offering full customer tech support on any issue.  But NetSol continues doing whatever they want on the mere basis that they control the registry, which of course is their primary business (and probably why NetSol so flagrantly abuses its human customer relationships).

I am sure that the buyer was happy, as whoever it was messed-up in the first attempt to purchase the domain at the agreed upon price after the first month was up and hadn’t sent the required FAX that NetSol’s Certified Offer Service was looking for, and I did not quibble about the price once they re-initiated a contract for sale after the previous offer and contract had expired.

I have made a mistake, though.  I deleted the sales listing for Soo-Foo.com from my Sedo account.  I should have just set it as ‘not for sale’ because the new owner still hasn’t changed the name servers for the domain.  That means that any PPC funds the domain produces using the old name servers set for Sedo will be lost to me since I can not add the domain name again as I won’t be able to be verified as the owner.

The new owner might be able to recover those funds if he/she signs-up at Sedo, though.  But probably won’t if he/she/they wouldn’t even bother trying to purchase the name through Sedo, originally.  Or maybe the buyer hasn’t actually taken possession of the name yet and it is still sitting in NetSol’s escrow account.  That would figure.

Despite NetSol’s attempt to treat anyone as badly as possible in order to leverage all advantages to itself, the sale of Soo-Foo.com did go through and I am happy with the outcome.  But I am not happy with the process as noted above, but that isn’t even the full story.  After acknowledging the successful transfer of the domain name to their transfer holding account in one email, the Certified Offer Service sent another email indicating that the transfer was unsuccessful and the sale was stopped.  This was obviously a hick-up in their system programming, but it is truly an enormous problem.  Why the heck can’t this giant corporate player get simple domain name transfer monitoring programmed correctly?

To top that off, upon receiving the first email saying that the transfer to their specified holding account was verified early in the day on Friday, that second email indicating that the transfer had failed and therefore the sale halted came late in the day on Friday and I did not see it until after the close of business.  Of course I wrote back, strongly objecting to their apparent failure to fulfill their contract of sale and threatening legal action if they did not complete the transaction.  And of course, since it was the weekend I did not expect a reply until the next week.  But I didn’t even get that reply on the following Monday.  It was late on Tuesday before I heard an apology for their mistake.  I can’t believe how unprofessional they are.

Thank God I have setup Domain Hostmaster, because as a Domainer I require great honest support available 24/7 at the kinds of competitive prices that anyone can afford along with all those free extras I include in every package.  And yes, I am my own best customer.  😉

By the way, what does “Soo-Foo” mean, you may ask?  That is the nickname for the city of Sioux Falls (pronounced Soo Fahls), where I live.  So I did have some designs on that domain name, myself.  Luckily, I have a couple of other options for local area branding solutions that are still in my possession.  😀

Widget Droid

I registered the domain name WidgetDroid.com yesterday.  I think that Android 2 is a big hit and it just needs some decent devices to take advantage of it. Verizon has already announced that they will be releasing the Droid to the public on Friday, which appears to be a very highly capable smart phone/device.

I didn’t register WidgetAndroid.com for 2 reasons: widgetandroid.com looks more like Widget And Roid than Widget Android, and because Google has declared the Android name as a Trademark and seem to want to protect that name.

But I want to get an Android powered smart phone someday, when I can afford it, and I think this domain will be a good one for recommending and selling widget downloads for the Android operated devices that will be coming out, now.

Wish me luck!  😉

-Doug

Domainer’s Names Update and Portfolio Clean-up

I updated Domainer’s Names.  I didn’t do much, but I created a new Twibe, “Names“, so I added my Twitter and Twibe links to the site.  I also added my Facebook info and a Twitter tweets widget to the bottom of the page.

I still have to add a couple of “Follow Me” buttons for Twitter and for Facebook to the site.  I am still looking for a good selection of Facebook buttons, but I did find what I think is possibly the best collection of free high quality public domain Twitter icons ever, at http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/07/50-free-and-exclusive-twitter-icons/ – both raster and vector masters are included so that we can do anything we want with them (whether for personal use or for commercial use).  I hope I find some that are near as good for Facebook.

I did start a fan page for Symbiotic Design (my freelance design studio) on Facebook, but all I have done is create it and so I want to actually do something with it before I start linking to it (like design something there).  Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time as then I would wind-up messing with my unemployment.  I’ll also leave you a link to my facebook profile page as username “symbioticdesign“, even though I’ve never even sat down and looked at how I might actually design a decent facebook profile/wall/page, yet.  I need to get that stuff done, but I don’t have a large staff working for me, either.

Once I rewrite my resume (again) and  get my portfolio straightened-out for potential employers I probably will be able to tackle that, next.  Looking for a decent or dream job takes up a lot of time and energy, though.  And I’m not allowed to get too sophisticated with my new designs anymore because unemployment will only let me work a few hours a week on my own websites as that is deemed as work.  So I am trying to develop some clean and simple website designs to base others off, for now.

Right now I am just trying to clean-up My portfolio and make sure it’s presentable, as I am sure my next job will count on it, should I be lucky enough to find something in the lines of my chosen career path. There are a few domain names that I need to delete from the domain name portfolio at domainers.name/portfolio/, and a couple to add.  But I did update my main portfolio list at Symbiotic.Biz.

I did pick-up four new domains that I will use to showcase some of my photography and art as Twitter backdrops.  I’m going to use WordPress and post them via blog at TwiDrops.com (eventually) so that I don’t have to spend time designing a site for them.  Backing-up that main TwiDrops.com domain will also be TwiDrop.com, TweeDrops.com and TweeDrop.com.  Once again, I am making sure that I cover any possible misspells or misunderstandings of the brand so that the site can easily be found.

These 4 TwiDrops brand domains are the only ones that I have left off of the Symbiotic.Biz names list, but that domain name list is static and is actually short by about 100 other names that are more adult/poker oriented.   That list is easier for a kid to access, so I try to keep that one family friendly and kid safe.   I do try to list all my domains at Domainers.Name, and I am still updating that name portfolio now.

Create a Quick Website Logo or a Page Heading for Free

The Standard Logo logo. Created with the free website logo/heading design tool on site.

I setup a simple page at Standard Logo so that anyone can use Xara’s simple free 3D Logo/Heading Design Tool.  This will allow some who cannot afford a professional designer (such as myself) the opportunity to get online on a smaller budget.

Remember that there is no alternative for a professionally designed logo.  However, I have seen so many websites without even so much as an attempt at a decent logo that I feel sorry for them.  This program isn’t going to make a fancy icon for your logo, it will simply extrude your font or otherwise give it a 3D look.  So as long as you are going to use the characters of your name, you shouldn’t run into imporoperly using any of the subliminal messages that symbols, colors and graphic images send out.  This way, if you stick with your company name, website name, or an acronym, you shouldn’t have to worry about getting in trouble.  Just play with the Logo/Heading Design Tool at Standard Logo and you should find something you like and can use on your website (possibly even your business card).

The StandardLogo.com logo, as created through the on-site free 3D Logo/Heading Design Tool.