Now, Network Solutions has begun to grab domain names that people search for on its Web site but don’t immediately register. According to AP Internet Writer Jesdaunun, “the name is locked up for about four days, during which the person who made the search can buy it directly from the company for $35 a year - a few times more than what many of its rivals charge. After that, the name returns to the pool and can be registered by anyone through any registration company.”

“Spokeswoman Susan Wade said Network Solutions was trying to combat domain name front running — the use of insider information to snatch desired domain names before an individual or business can register them. Wade said the company was making adjustments in response to feedback but considered its measure a benefit for customers - by preventing domain name speculators and others with questionable intentions from grabbing the name first.”

“We are not front running,” she said. “We are not monetizing the page. We have no intent in keeping it. We have no intent in selling it in secondary markets at inflated prices — that is front running.”

Jesdaunun goes on that “in October, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers launched a probe into domain name front running and likened it to a stock broker buying or selling shares ahead of a client’s trade, in anticipation of a movement in price. The committee said the practice isn’t necessarily prohibited under current regulations but could dampen the domain name industry’s image within the Internet community.”

As a business with more than 10 years working to get client’s the best deal, there is no reason to ever go with Network Solution’s $35/year pricing. You should be paying about $7/year. Period.

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CNET’s security blogger Michael Horowitz described more extensively in a recent blog entry “Update your Flash Player Now - And Do It Right” the low-down and why it is so important to upgrade right away your browsers on Macs, Linux and Windows to version 9.0.115.0.

“On December 18, give or take, Adobe Systems released a security bulletin that basically says old versions of the Flash player are buggy as heck (see Flash Player update available to address security vulnerabilities). Specifically, versions 9.0.48.0 and earlier contain nine different bugs that Adobe calls critical. Simply viewing a Web page is all it takes for a bad guy to take control of your computer. This is true on Macs and Linux too. The only way to be safe is to upgrade to the newest version, 9.0.115.0.”

Horowitz goes on to say that “I read a number of articles on this topic before writing this posting and none mentioned the fact that you have to update the Flash player for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The two browsers use separate and independent copies of Flash. You can see this in the screenshot above from the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Windows XP control panel. The ActiveX version is used by Internet Explorer, the plug-in version is used by Firefox.”

“The right way also means uninstalling the prior version of Flash before installing the new version, not installing any other software other than the Flash player and being 100 percent sure that all old versions of the software have been removed, even those in nonstandard locations.” Horowitz recommends the following course of action:

• Check which version of Flash plugin is installed: This is really easy, just open in each of your browsers www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/ and you’ll learn which plugin version is installed.
• Uninstall your old flash player plugins: Rather than going straight to Adobe’s Flash Player Download Center, Horowitz suggest to first remove old old versions of the previous flash plugin. “Adobe has instructions on how to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control that include a link to download its uninstall programs.” Download the uninstaller, quit all browsers, then run the uninstaller.
• Upgrade to version 9.0.115.0 of Flash Player: “After running the uninstaller, go back to the uninstaller’s tester page to verify that the Flash player was uninstalled correctly. If it was, you should see” a green jigsaw piece, prompting you to install the plug-in. Click on it and follow the self-explanatory procedure.”

That should do the trick. If it doesn’t, visit Horowitz’s blog to learn about several non-standard situations that could complicate your upgrade process.

Jennifer Rice, a brand consultant, shares her excellent advice on what constitutes good brand positioning:

• Five words or less. See if you can write your own tagline that clearly captures the essence of your brand. And don’t whine and say that’s a copywriter’s job… if you can’t boil down the brand essence into a short, memorable phrase, chances are a copywriter can’t either. It’s not a quick and easy process, but it pays off.
• Use consumer language. Too many times I’ve worked with clients who’ve insisted that we use certain phrases in the positioning that make sense internally but not to customers, or they’re so focused on features that they forget that customers care more about benefits. To get yourself in a customer state of mind, write your positioning statements from a customer’s point of view. For example, “If I choose x instead of (alternative), I will (get what benefit) because (primary reason to believe)”
• The 4D positioning rule is desirable by customers, distinctive from the competition, deliverable by the company, and durable over time. A good brand position will sit at the intersection of these four requirements.

All very good points that make sense - but how does it apply to Bright Launch’s mission statement? Let’s start with Jennifer’s 4D Rule:

• Desirable: comprehensive, tailored IT solutions delivered in a personalized manner
• Distinctive: sophisticated, appealing design at competitive prices
• Deliverable: relying on robust, free open-source software and best-practices
• Durable: measurable impact on a client’s business

Mmmh, that’s part of it, but I got to think about it more.

But once that’s done, how do you get noticed, how do you get traffic? In many instances, clients assume that the Internet organically embeds their site in the rich, evergrowing tapestry called www. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Advertising seems like one avenue, but most clients try to enlist social tools such as Digg to get noticed. Does it work?

Dev Lounge enlightens us with a little story, and goes on to say that… “Digg is nothing more than a burst of traffic and a status symbol […]. It is a bit disappointing, considering if you found any of our best articles anywhere else, say Vitamin, [our pages] would have been crowned with front page status a long time ago. Instead, we walk down the red carpet alongside the other stars, but the reporters and paparazzi ignore us. We’re okay with that, because hopefully, sometime soon, we’ll be due to break out […].

My point? Spending time on getting your site noticed on Digg and all the other bookmarking sites is pretty pointless. You should rather spend contributing original material to the sites where your target audience mingles. That’s what gives you targeted traffic that is much more valuable.

Read full story …

It’s less time than an elevator pitch. As of 2007, website surfers are sophisticated enough that they expect your website to conform to “established” standards, meaning things like the location of your search box, navigation, or advertising. On top of this, they will instantly evaluate whether or not your design is worse - or better - than the sites that they normally visit. What does it mean for your site? You better present yourself in the best light possible, to ensure you end up in that second category.

The same goes for your copy, as a recent article in Digital Web magazine points out.

Evaluate Your Copy

• Make sure your graphics are proportionate to the rest of the body text. Huge images that take up most of the screen not only convey very little about the subject, they also keep readers from your content. Don’t assume that everyone will scroll below the fold.
• Take a look at your stats, and you’ll see that a surprising number of the visits to your site last less than a minute. Sure, some of those may be bots or search engines, but real visitors are making decisions about your site in the time it takes to blink. The average visitor scans a web page rather than reading it […].
• Keep it relevant. An image is like a headline; choose images that speak clearly to your point. An obscure or meaningless image is just filler. Worse, it breaks up the rhythm of your words without adding anything of value to the page […].
• Remember the white space. Style your images so that they have enough space surrounding them to flow seamlessly with the rest of the paragraph. An attractively styled image won’t slow the eye in its journey across your page.

What works?

• Pull quotes: Just as in print articles, pull quotes are a great way to highlight individual lines of text. They provide a nice visual alternative to an unbroken expanse of text, and they give an air of importance to the writer’s words. Try to choose lines that are descriptive but not entirely headline-worthy. A good pull quote whets readers’ appetites without making them scratch their collective heads and ask, “Huh?”
• Blurbs: Sure, you know all about headlines, but The Stanford-Poynter Eyetracking Study found that including blurbs below headlines increased the amount of time readers spent on an average page by about 33%. Blurbs also encouraged readers to scroll down the page, which increases the likelihood that they will be bowled over by your brilliant prose. Like a pull quote, a good blurb is descriptive without completely robbing the article of all mystery.
• Icons: Web iconography instantly denotes certain site elements. A hard drive with an arrow? Download. Speech bubble? Comments. Why not make it easy on your viewers by using a few […].
• Linkage: Viewers are used to identifying a certain style (blue, underlined) as a link. Boring, right? It doesn’t have to be. Style your links in such a way that they’re obvious even to people who aren’t reading your copy by making them graphically different from the rest of your text […].
• Lists: In web copy, lists are like M&M candies: tiny, fun, and easy to eat by the handful. Or, wait, lists may not taste quite as good. No matter—readers love lists. No pesky body copy to wade through: A list is information distilled to its essence. They’re perfect for the restless viewer because they require so little work.

What doesn’t work?

• Ads: Viewers tend to skip right over advertising, especially if it’s in the traditional right-hand column. Ads that use an unobtrusive text link are more effective than a flashing banner.
• Animation: If it looks too much like an ad, viewers will avoid it. The exception to this rule? User-controlled animation. If the viewer can stop and start the animation at will, it becomes an interactive element and can actually entice the user to stay on the site.
• Inconsistency: Nothing breaks up the flow like a mid-section layout change. People rely on visual cues to tell them how to process the information on your site, and changing those cues without good reason is confusing at best […]

In conjunction with the presentation, 43 Folders has a special series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. Make it a point to visit each of the posts below. Your boss won’t regret it.

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

• 43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”
• Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a definition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”
• Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”
• Inbox Zero: Where filters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”
• Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”
• Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and find a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”
• Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”
• Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”
• Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the first time, a clean record and a fresh start.”
• Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

Anyone can have a newsletter, regardless of what type of site your running, or if you even run a site at all. Designers have newsletters to showcase new work to potential and previous clients. Companies use newsletters to showcase new and on sale products, and of course, new web startups use them to get the word out about launches, betas, and etc.

The question is not really do you need one, but will it benefit your visitors and if so, how? In the case of a designer, the more work potential clients see, the higher the chance they’ll hire you to do work for them. In the case of companies, its always good to advertise sales and fresh products, because it helps get the potential buyer interested, which can lead to valuable sales.

A recent article in Dev Lounge goes into deeper detail, including the various options of sending newsletters. If you’re thinking about it, you’re more than ready for the article.

• Getting a visitor to pay attention to a newsletter requires a bit of design and organizational skills next to the ability to include something worthy of reading. The days of plain text email are dying away, with most email providers allowing html based emails […].
• Don’t sit there saying “what makes a good newsletter design?”, because the question can be both answered and solved simply by looking around. Emails just appear in a persons inbox - they are no different than sites.
• A good place to start is by mimicking your own site design in a newsletter design. [P]ull the colors, logos, link styling, and fonts from your actual site layout to let the reader get a feeling like they’re at the site themselves without leaving their inbox.

Read full article »

Is it the content? Is it the fact that we struggle to get that “first comment” that leads to many more comments? Below are a few excerpts from a relevant post on Dev Lounge:

• What’s the big deal anyways? As an author, you always want to hear from the audience and get their response to what you’re saying. Did it make any sense to them at all? Was the piece helpful, or just a waste of five minutes of reading? Comments help authors determine what they’re doing wrong, how they can correct things, and how they can improve their writing style to better the connection to their audience […]. The truth is, response is almost as critical the actual piece itself. An blog author without comments is like a dog without a bone - pissed off and laying down in the corner.
• Writing Style Matters
  Every person is different, and everyone does things a little differently. One thing that seems to determine comments is the authors individual writing style. How they convey themselves on what they’re talking about in each article has a lot of effect on the readers. If the author seems confused what they’re telling the reader to do, the reader will immediately dismiss the article and move on […].
• Leave in some openness
  Some people tend to forget how open-endedness can really help a posts response. Add in questions that get visitors to think and form logical responses. If you’re dealing with a controversial topic or one that has multiple solutions, once some visitors start voicing their opinions, others will get involved with their own responses. This can lead to a heavy build up of comments, and an ongoing discussion between site visitors, which is always a good thing.
• Join In
  No matter how many comments an article may have, either a lot or a little, make sure you’re getting involved in the response as well. A lot of times people will ask me questions about “how to do this” or “is this possible” in relation to my multi-article Wordpress customization guides. I try to help as much as I can, and point them in the right direction when I can’t give full blown out instructions. Just like you like to hear from visitors, visitors like to hear from authors so they know their comments aren’t falling on deaf ears. This also helps spark some of that back and forth commenting I talked about above.
• You Comment Mine, I’ll Comment Yours
  I heard that commenting on others peoples blogs will also help you turn in the comments yourself. I haven’t had much success with this, as I’ve commented on many other peoples blogs but have not received the same response back. It usually take a link to show up in Mint to here something from a fellow site. If you’re going to go with the “1-for-1 exchange”, make sure the comment you left on another site was deeply formulated and well thought out, as it will increase the chances of that author returning the favor to your own articles. Posting a simple “Nice post” generally doesn’t yield many results.
• Design Matters
  Site design also plays a big part in harvesting comments. If a design is poorly put together, you can expect visitors to not waste much time trying to figure out how or where to go to leave a comment. Make it easier for them by inserting skip to comment links at the top of articles (now added here), and dedicating a clear place for responses either at the top, bottom, or sides of posts. Don’t make readers leave the page unless they really have to (IE, discussing in a forum thread). Make sure if you were a visitor to your site, you would understand how commenting works, because if it’s hard for you to grasp the concept, imagine the difficulty it could cause first time visitors.
• Articles + Response = Happy You
  In the end if you’re successful with getting visitors to respond to your posts, you’ll feel much better about hitting that publish button, and you’ll probably find yourself doing it a lot more. Make a personal connection with your visitors, and give them something to talk about. Hopefully I’ll see myself having to hear from you in response to this article, otherwise I might have to head back into a corner with a dog somewhere […].

Read the full article >

Rated E for Everyone.

Watch the video »

“I find it a shame to witness the incredible amount of people undervaluing the importance of their logo. Here are just a few excerpts of the many blog and forum posts I’ve been receiving lately.

• “I need a vector logo for my business. Must be able to be resized without losing the quality. I have the logo idea…. Budget: (US$50).”
• “The prize for the winning company logo design is $100 USD payable in your paypal the day the contest ends, and the contest deadline will be the 1st of May. We will wait for your creatives, and wish good luck to all contestants. Let the battle begin!”
• “I’m a professional logo designer offering my skills. Prices can range from $20 (approx. £11) up to around $280 (approx. £150) with various package options along the way.”

I agree with David completely, this is downright crazy. Airey goes on, saying “a business person spending $50 on professional design services shouldn’t be expecting anything more than one hours’ work at the most, so to value your corporate identity like that isn’t a wise move (…). Yes, you might be on a tight budget, as most people starting a business are, but being in business doesn’t come cheap. You have to spend money at the beginning or it will end up costing much more for a re-design / re-brand further down the line (because you do get what you pay for and you will come to realise your logo is rubbish).”

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