Article: Web Primer – Domain Names
Your website has just gone live. You have tweaked every word to ensure that it communicates your message clearly and powerfully. The HTML is perfectly coded so that search engines have the best chance of sending your site to the top of their listings. The design is beautiful and elegant, and having had it tested on countless computers you are sure that it will look great on any screen. Your web developer deserves a pat on the back, and so do you for hiring someone so competent.
However, it is quite possible that a decision you made weeks, months or even years ago will have a big impact on the success of your website, and certainly on the speed of its growth. Choosing the right domain name (the bit that comes after ‘www’, so prominentmedia.com or google.co.uk for example) is incredibly important. As a professional web developer, I am only occasionally asked for to advise on domain name selection, which is a shame because in many cases I could help my clients pick a domain name which makes growing their website even easier.
Slowly backing away from 3G?
I love my 3G laptop card, even though it nearly cost me £1,050 the last time I used it (in Spain, watching video highlights of the US Presidential debates). Yikes!
Now I see on TechCrunch that AT&T has bought Wayport, a US WiFi hotspot operator, in a $275 million deal. I wonder if that will prove portentous for the UK, where mobile carriers are still trying to recoup their £22 BILLION investment in 3G licenses. If the operating costs are significantly higher than WiFi, will we see the same thing in the UK? And if so, who are the big players in the WiFi hotspot market?
The Cloud already provides a similar service for O2 and Orange (although they levy a monthly fee, unlike AT&T), while the others are either doing their own thing (T-Mobile) or ignoring WiFI altogether (Vodafone). If WiFi continues to grow, while being much cheaper to support than 3G, will we see the incumbent carriers invest more heavily there?
Should be interesting to watch, in any case.
The benefit of misfortune
Yesterday, Barack Obabma was elected President of the United States of America. He absolutely stormed it; a landslide, a rout. But just eight years ago his first foray into mainstream politics ended in failure. He stood for election to the House of Representatives, and lost convincingly in the primary.
I can only imagine the disappointment of losing an election; the days, weeks, months of work that seem wasted. The humiliation of rejection. The sacrifice unrewarded. But actually, in the end it worked out rather well.
As Edward McClelland says in his excellent piece, How Obama learned to be a natural:
Only after losing that race, in humiliating fashion, did he develop the voice, the style, the track record and the agenda that have made him a celebrity senator, and a Next President.
The setback was the making of him; his strengths were forged in the fire of adversity. But more than Obama’s ability to learn from his mistakes, I can also see the hand of fate.
I was struck by Alex Massie’s quote in this post, on the day before Barack Obama was elected:
Had he won the House race vs. Bobby Rush in 02 [sic] he’d probably be lost in Jesse Jackson Jr’s shadow and relegated to a life of obscurity.
You just never know.
Article: Seven reasons to avoid JavaScript dynamic navigation
I’ve been a web developer for over eight years, and in that time I’ve been fortunate enough to see several bad ideas go out of fashion, including splash screens and unnecessary framesets. However, one really bad idea that seems to be hanging around is the use of JavaScript for dynamic navigation menus. This is bad for several reasons – seven of the most obvious of which are listed after the jump:
When Gordon finally calls an election…
… can we have a British one of these, please?
Funny ‘follow-up’ vid after the jump.
American Presidential Election 2008
I don’t know about you, but I have been spending waaaay too much time thinking and reading all about this for the past few months. The primaries, with Clinton’s famous mistakes and lies exaggerations, and Obama’s sheer likeability. The campaign proper, once it became clear that it was going to be Obama vs. McCain. Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP pick!
Of course, I have no say in any of this, and I’m not even sure that the outcome will have much of an effect on me personally, but I am enjoying following the race, and not just because it more-than-adequately fills the void left by The West Wing. (Other West Wing fans will probably love this, if they haven’t seen it already)
Now things are really heating up, and with the only area of disagreement being just how badly McCain is trailing in the polls, the Republican infighting has begun. There are even reports that straight-talking Governor Palin has ‘gone rogue‘.
How to find things that you have lost
Professor Solomon has the answers. Simple wisdom, clearly stated. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything on the web was this useful?
Film Club – 18 November 2008: Superbad
James Bond has a lot to answer for. Last month, he inspired our screening of Layer Cake, but way before that, back when I was a wee lad, he had me convinced that the only way a girl would ever find me attractive was if I saved her from mortal peril. Quite honestly, I thought I was never going to get a girlfriend, because Newport Pagnell has to be one of the safest places on earth.
Article: Website Navigation Essentials
Though it sounds simple, one of the keys to making a website easy to use is giving people a clear indication of where in the site they are now, have been previously and should go next. This is the job of the site’s navigation elements.
In previous years, the consensus was that the main function of website navigation was to take visitors from your front page to the area of the site they wanted to visit. However in today’s search-engine-dominated World Wide Web, this model is unlikely to be the most accurate.
Moving the ‘millionaire’ goalposts
In amongst an interesting post from Lisa Everitt over at BNET on the online shopping habits of the rich, I saw this:
Google surveyed the shopping habits of 263 millionaires (shoppers 25 to 64 with an income of more than $1 million [emphasis mine]) and 730 ultra-affluents (net worth of $1 million, household incomes of $250,000 or more for married couples).
Given that the usual definition of millionare (‘A person whose wealth exceeds one million units of any currency’) would cover all of these people, I feel almost sorry for the ‘ultra-affluents’ whose million-dollar net worths and quarter-million incomes just don’t cut it any more. I wonder who is going to break the bad news?