Domain extensions are the domain name suffixes, such as .com, .net, and .org. With all of the country extensions as well as the specialty extensions,  there are over 200 extensions worldwide. And, soon, businesses will be able to buy (for a large sum of money) custom extensions.

So, how may extensions do you need to purchase?

In short, we do not recommend getting carried away with purchasing domains. If possible, you will want to get the .com domain name for your key brand name or the term you most want your business identified with.

There are several reasons why you might want to purchase a large number of domain names. These include:

1. Taking preventative action to try to “lock-up” a particular brand or business name.
2. To control misspellings or variations on your main domain name so you can route traffic to your site for those who mistype your name.
3. You plan to develop multiple sites related to your main business focus.

While there is some merit to controlling your brand and preventing others from encroaching on your business name, we think you would be better off to focus your time and money on creative marketing rather than attempting to lock up a lot of domain names.

This article “Domain Name Registration: Tips on Domain Selection and Buying” is a great resource for selecting a domain name.

I love @chrisbrogan’s approach because he has the ability – on a daily basis – to ask simple, focused questions that always seem to be appropriate to what I am grappling with at the time. Of course, I realize I am one of hundreds who is simultaneously going through the same experience, but it feels like Chris is talking directly to me. Ahh, the genius of a great communicator.

Today’s question from Chris: What are the results of all your hard work?

Simple enough. And, on a day like Thanksgiving, after a wonderful afternoon of sharing with family, it is a good time for me to “go deep” and think about why it is I’m pushing so hard each day.

The results Staci and I have created:

1. A “family” of awesome customers – many of whom are able to live their dream of having a successful ecommerce business.

2. A workplace that provides an engaging, challenging atmosphere for our dedicated team.

3. An opportunity for Staci and I to work together to build our vision and exercise our creativity on a daily basis.

4. A model for my kids about what it looks like to put your heart into an endeavor, to live each day with determination and conviction.

We are lucky, indeed. Every day presents new challenges – some which seem overwhelming – but all having an elegant solution waiting to be discovered.

I am logging off for now, but I will see you on the Internet in the morning, ready to go for it, once again.

It is amazing how time flies. How long has it been that you first unveiled your Ecommerce website? If it has been 5 or more years, it is likely time to take a step back and take stock of your site.

I am not just talking about the visual design. A good design is important, but there are many aspects to a successful, high-performing web business. Have you been keeping up with the Jones (or Amazons)?

With each passing year (actually, with each passing day!) the web economy keeps evolving. Customers are more sophisticated and have developed certain expectations. So the question is – does your web presence provide what your customers are after?

If you want an  in-depth overview of some of the key areas to assess, head over to our HEROweb Marketing and Design site and read our latest article, called Take Your Ecommerce Website to the Next Level.

As a side note, if your website has evolved quite a bit over the years, it can be fun to go to The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) and take a moment to appreciate the evolution of your site, and your business. Perhaps you have already come a long way!

I just came across this tweet from Matt McGee in my Twitter flow :

@mattmcgee if you don’t believe in the power of exact-match domains, you’re nuts.

If you are unfamiliar with the term “exact-match domain” it is referring to the words of a domain name that exactly match a popular search phrase.

It is a little hard to believe that in 2009 the search engines put so much weight on the domain name, but some quick searches easily bear out the importance of the domain name.

Here is just one arbitrary example: go to Google and search for “model boats”. You will see that virtually every one of the matching urls on the first page has one or both of the words in it.

You can easily do some more searching on your own to verify the importance of the domain name.

Sure, there are still many other important SEO factors, but the domain name is huge. If organic search placement is critical to your success, don’t overlook the importance of securing a name that matches your top phrase.

URL shorteners are web-based services that allow you to input a long url and have a shortened version generated that you can use to direct people to the original address. You can use the shortened url anywhere where you don’t want to show a hideously long url.

With the explosion of Twitter, which has a 140 character limit to each post, the use of URL shorteners has also exploded, since every character in a 140 character post is precious.

Here are your options of using url shorteners, in conjunction with Twitter:

Plan A. Twitter has url shortening built in. Up until May ’09, Twitter was using the TinyURL service, and since May, they have been using bit.ly. If you enter a url that is longer than 30 characters, Twitter will shorten it for you. However, if you paste in a url that pushing you over your 140 character limit, you need to go to Plan B.

Plan B. This plan involves using one of the myriad of url shortening services that will shorten your url for you. I use bit.ly. It works well and has a range of “features” that I like. You’d be amazed at how many features a url shortener can have, like automated posting to Twitter, a Firefox widget for easy integration, customizable short urls, and historical tracking.

Search Engine Land has a nice feature grid, which I won’t repeat here. I am linking to it, using a shorten-url, of course! http://bit.ly/XyOej

Here are the steps for using bit.ly.

1. Go to bit.ly and add an account with your Twitter info.

2. Drag the Bookmarklet to your browser.

3. Go to a web page you want to reference in your Twitter post.

4. Click the “Shorten with bit.ly” bookmarklet.

You will be directed to the bit.ly site with your shorten url displayed as well as a text entry area for you to post directly to Twitter.

5. Either copy the short url and go back to Twitter to do your posting or create your post directly at bit.ly’s site and click the Post button. Your post will show up in your Twitter account.

It is really that easy.

URL shorteners are a way of life if you are a die-hard twitterer. Some people are wary of them because if the service breaks or goes out of business you could have a trail of broken urls in all your posts. We might cover that topic on another day.

For now, we are shortening to our heart’s content. Because 140 characters does not give you a lot to work with.

We are proud to announce the launch of customized product feeds for websites running the MightyMerchant platform! What does this mean, you might ask?

Simply put, product feeds are a way to send your website product data to countless other websites and comparison shopping engines, including the big ones like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo. They give you the opportunity to get your products in front of many more shoppers and drive them to your site for purchasing.

One popular service is Google Base (Formerly called Froogle), a free service which allows you to submit items to Google, which then come up in searches in Google Product Search. Sometimes, these products will even come up in a standard search. As an example, try searching for “simax heavy wall tubing” in Google, and you will likely see Shopping Results near the top of the page showing specific products available on one particular MightyMerchant site, glass supply distributor Winship Designs. Talk about great exposure!

Although MightyMerchant has offered Google Base feeds for years, we are now offering managed feed services to ensure your products are optimized for maximum exposure, as well as target a much broader range of comparison shopping engines. There are many other services online that allow you to submit a product feed to increase your product’s visibility. Some of these include:

• Yahoo Shopping
• Nextag.com
• Shopzilla.com
• www.become.com
• Shopping.com
• Pricegrabber.com

…and many more! Chances are if you find a site that accepts a feed, we can build a custom feed in the required format and get your products an online presence far beyond your site.

If you would like more details about this exciting feature, or feel like this is something your site must have, then Contact Us and we’d be happy to discuss how custom product feeds could help your business.

Let me start by saying there is no foolproof way to prevent people from downloading images off your website. However, there are a number of strategies that will deter the average visitor to your website.

1. Disable right-click. There are a number of javascripts available that will disable a user’s ability to right-click and download an image to his or her computer. There are a number of javascripts available at Dynamic Drive. However, these javascripts may not work in all browsers and even if the javascript works, an easy workaround is taking a screen shot.

2. Watermark your images. A watermark directly embedded into your images will make it harder for someone to use the images unless they have really good image-editing skills. However, watermarks can be cropped out unless they’re fairly large.

3. Transparent gif. A transparent gif the same size as your image with, for example, the word “Sample” can be placed over the image. If someone right-clicks to download the image they will end up downloading the gif file, rather than the image itself. Screen shots and editing are still problems, but this method may be easier than embedding a watermark.

4. Post low-resolution images. Low resolution images (72 dpi) are unlikely to be used for hi-resolution printing.

5. Have a copyright statement on your website. This lets people know that the content of the website is officially yours.

Sample copyright statement: “Contents of this web site and all original works are © copyright your name here – All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of owner.”

If you find that someone has used your images on another website, DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) rules require the website host to remove the images if, after notification and any counter-claims, it is found that the site has violated copyright. DMCA official website: www.loc.gov/copyright

Life presents us with learning opportunities at every turn. Staci and I just finished teaching our last session in a 4-week series of classes on getting started with a website. We were the instructors, and we still learned a ton.

The course was called “Making Your Mark Online” and was run through the Lane Community College Business Development Center.

The class was a great challenge for us as we were attempting to distill down everything we have learned after 13 years in the web business down to four 90-minute sessions.

Were we successful? Well, kind-of, sort-of. The participants were an interesting mix of eight individuals, most of whom were considering getting started with some kind of web venture and wanting to gather information so they could make the right moves.

And, boy oh boy, did we give out information. The broad outline of the class was as follows:

1. Planning – Putting together a plan for developing a successful web business.

2. Technologies – Learn about the range of technologies that are involved with a website.

3. Providers – Assessing the different types of providers that you will want to consider working with when building your web business.

4. Marketing – Surveying the range of online marketing strategies for promoting your business.

Our goal was to allow each participant to understand what they need to know to make the key decisions in getting their online business going. I think we were successful in getting people to focus their thinking in the right direction. But, in hindsight, we were way too ambitious in packing all of our material into four sessions. In the wrap-up marketing session, I don’t think I had time to take a breath in the 90 minute session.

Next time around (and, we are teaching the class again in the Spring term) we will tone down the material and provide some more outside resources.

The topics that we covered in the class were ones that we talk about every day with our customers. But, by structuring our knowledge into four concise presentations, we gained a clearer perspective for the challenge a newbie faces when jumping into the web business.

The main lesson I “re-learned” was the importance of creating a plan before diving into a web venture. Every decision point needs to refer back to the original plan, and, the truth is, the plan is going to need to be re-shaped along the way. But if you start by clarifying your vision, defining your metrics, and understanding your current resources, you will be in a much better position to evaluate the range of options before you.

We have posted the PowerPoint slides from the class and some other materials on our website. We will see you at the next session!

Most email campaign managers – Constant Contact and the like, offer very nice campaign tracking tools. But I like to centralize my tracking and get everything flowing through Google Analytics, so I can closely analyze my conversions.

Here is an excellent overview of how to build your links in your email campaign software so your data gets tracked in Google Analytics.

http://www.epikone.com/blog/2008/11/04/email-tracking-with-google-analytics/

Warning: if you get queasy looking at urls with more than 46 characters, this exercise might not be for you!

This week in the US has demonstrated a peaceful transition from one administration to another. Sorry.. no political commentaries on this blog. The inauguration festivities highlight what is great about the US. And wouldn’t you know it, right on the heals of the oath of office we have a new White House website. Woo hoo.

I plan to do my small part to be involved in getting our country out of our current quagmire and I am going to be a user of the online resources put out by the administration. So I just checked out President Obama’s new site.

Here is a quick review of the new http://whitehouse.gov website. Feel free to add your own thoughts.

Visual

The site is simple and clean. Nothing visually off the charts about the new design. But what would you expect? I can only imagine the committee involved to decide what background color to use in the banner. And besides, we are talking about POTUS here. Clean and dignified is a good design approach.

I am always a sucker for home page slide shows. And I think having one on the site is a nice touch (and it is not even done with Flash, which is a good move).

Usability

I have a few suggestions in the usability department.

The slideshow, which I said I like, is quite large. It could be effective without taking up so much prime real estate. I had to scroll to get to anything else.

The width of the design is over 1000 pixels. That is a little wider than I would like to see on a fixed width design. We work with non-power users in our business who get confused or flustered when the stuff they need to get to is not right in front of them. I would knock off 150 pixels.

I am a fan of having a Home link. Well, there is one in the text links that occupy the bottoms of the pages. Other than that, that I can’t find one, can you? Disclosure: I am playing a little naive here. I realize that the images at the top of the page do link back to the home page. But my experience is that a lot of users never make the connection that they can click on images that are not clearly marked.

Things start getting a little hairy with the navigation. I click “the Briefing Room” and then slide over to “Proclamations”. I have to fess up, I don’t really know exactly what a presidential proclamation is. But I was curious to find out. Once I got there, I was ready to back out and go somewhere else. But wait. The breadcrumb navigation is not actually linked to anything. There is some navigation on the right side of the page to drill down to other areas in the Briefing Room. But, when I click on several of those links, I lose my navigation. Help!

My suggestion: 1) Keep the breadcrumb navigation consistent at the top of the pages and turn the text into links. 2) Rethink how to tie in the navigation of the different sections of the briefing room so it is easier to jump around without having to go back up to the main menu system at the top of the page.

Content

As I would expect, there is a lot of information on this website. It is a rather large organization – our government. I was not a user of the website under the previous administrations, so I don’t have a strong point of comparison. But I felt satisfied by the level of content on key issues as well as more fun stuff, like White House 101.

Building Community

It is all about building community, isn’t it? I am talking about the web AND I am talking about the message of our new administration. We have to work across the ideological divides that separate us and come together. How does the site foster  this movement? Maybe I am asking too much. But, I am a fan of the two-way web.

President Obama is leading with his blog. That is a good thing. But I want to know how I can participate. Those channels of communication are not jumping out at me. Ok, I don’t really expect this site to go completely Web 2.0, but I don’t see ideas and pointers of where I can get involved. If ever there is a site that needs a call to action, this is it!

I am not feeling inspired to be part of the process. After I have clicked around, I start to think that maybe I missed something on the Home Page. But dang it, I can’t find a link back to the Home Page.

Conclusion

I am excited as we transition to a new chapter in the life of our country. I hope the White House website continues to evolve as a powerful tool for Internet users. There is certainly room to grow.