Domain registration

[James]

David,

Can you recommend a cheap service that allows me to register some domain names but without any hosting package. It must be made easy for me to use these domains on a host of my choice in the future too. I use Supanames for my hosting but not sure they do registration of names only.

Hopefully it is only a few pounds - I want to register some ideas I have for the Thesis Project.

Cheers,

[David]

I use UKREG (http://www.ukreg.com/) and I hear good reports of 123REG (http://www.123reg.co.uk). Both these companies will register domains without associated hosting. You can simply set the DNS to point wherever you like. Expect to pay about £5 per year for .co.uk and £9-10 for .com and .net

[Phil]

oneandone.co.uk are £1.99 a year for a co.uk (min. 2 years).
they also do a "domain plus" account for £6.99 which is useful as it gives you a pop mail account - which you can check using your email client - rather than catch all forwarding.

[Tom]

Thought should precede action! Surely it would be better to draw up a draft business plan (see a note on this in the Content Management Study Guide) before doing a registration. Money should be kept out of drains!

[James]

I agree Tom, but for the sake of a fiver, I might as well register one or two names that I feel could be sought-after, just to protect them. I wouldn't dream of spending big bucks before a plan, but if it's that cheap I might just go ahead and register a couple anyway - no harm in it.

[Tom]

Certainly the cost would be manageable but (1) the danger of someone 'getting there first' is negligible [David nearly got Cadtutor.com, if I remember, but the fact that he did not has had few consequences, it would appear] (2) there is a danger that registering a few names will restrict limit your creativity - it will begin to seem like selecting one of three (3) but go ahead - this is a learning experience after all!

[David]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@Apr 6 2004, 1:23 pm
David nearly got Cadtutor.com, if I remember, but the fact that he did not has had few consequences, it would appear.
True, CADTutor.com was registered just one week before I got to it :(

On the other hand, do a search for "CADTutor" on google and see how far down the listing the .COM domain is - not in the top 50.

I don't think it can harm to register some names up-front even if you eventually realise they're not right. I've had a number of names that I registered from time-to-time thinking they'd be useful but have let them lapse. After I missed out on CADTutor.com, I registered CADFish.com thinking that I might use that instead. Rather glad I went for CADTutor.net in the end.

Of course, the other thing to consider is that it's perfectly possible to have more than one domain name pointing to a website - not sure if that's a good idea or not but variations/shorter versions etc. could be useful.

There is also brand protection to consider - make sure you grab all the various TLDs .COM .NET .ORG .BIZ .INFO .CO.UK etc.

[Tom]

And don't forget that a keyword strategy starts with the domain name. If you decide that the business idea centers on 'picture research' or 'image bank' or 'free image' or 'what ever' then those keywords should be in the domain. David set a great example with www.websitearchitecture.co.uk. I chose garden+visit and, for the present, am wishing I had chosen garden+guide.

[Tom]

I did a Google image search for Tom Turner and came up with an old drawing (not of me but by me). This makes me think that if one could discover the image keywords which people most often search on, and they were carefully embeded into file names and captions, then this could be a useful source of referrals to a picture/image/photograph library.

Another thought is that people are soon going to be wanting video clips for their websites - and they are likely to be in shorter supply than stills for a long time to come.

[francis]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@Apr 6 2004, 9:06 pm
And don't forget that a keyword strategy starts with the domain name.
Like this? (http://www.nice-tits.org/) Although there are a couple of, erm, points of note on the shop page (I'm moving to Rochester (or perhaps Finland), it's not the kind of thing you'd expect from that URL.

Maybe that's what members of the government should be looking at (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/07/misuse_computer_government/) instead of other sites. Glad to see our tax money is going to good use <_<

[Tom]

Beats me why http://www.imagesource.com/home.asp and http://www.imagesources.org/ are not Adsensible.

[Tom]

Can anyone work out what business model ARA Content (http://www.aracontent.com/olcontent/online.html) are using? They seem to give away both text and images.

[David]

Hmm, interesting. Maybe they plan a future premium service that they will charge for. I guess that once they have built up a dependent userbase and have developed a good track record, people may be willing to pay for extras.

[Tom]

The Dotcom Era web publisher's slogan was 'Build it and they will come'. Perhaps you are right and the new slogan is 'Get them coming and then start charging them'. I emailed the founder of Suite 101 (http://www.suite101.com/) about a year after they got started (perhaps 5 years ago) and he said this was exactly his plan. If you look at the site now you will find lots of funding ideas, including an online university, but none of them look very lucrative to me.

I guess they would do better with Adsense but a recent book I read on Web Advertising commented that bids for Adwords are reaching bubble proportions. The author drew a comparision with Banner Ads c1999. The difference is that Adwords bidders can monitor the ROI on their expenditurre from day to day. But they say some firms are doing it for brand building reasons. [Note re my Adsense income: the number of page views is going down but the income is going up]

Wannamaker made the best known quip about advertising. He said he knew for a fact that half the expenditure was wasted - the problem was that he did not know which half.

[James]

I have been trying to find a half decent domain name and was please to find that www.freedigitalphotos.co.uk is still available.

Does it matter that www.freedigitalphotos.com has been taken? It's not being used for free images anyway, it's a horrible web directory. If it was offering a similar service I would look for another name but as it's not ...

I imagine that as most of my traffic will come via Search Engines and links, it's probably not a problem.

What do you think?

[David]

James - I think that for such a project, you really need an international domain. Since freedigitalphotos.net is also available, you should go for that. There's no reason why you can't have both .net and .co.uk but I think you will find that the internet is essentially North American and as such, a .co.uk domain will look rather parochial.

[francis]

Could could take a slightly different tack on this, although freedigitalphotos is very good (although too long?). Tom mentioned Overture (http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/) as a system to see what people are search for. You throw in a search term and it gives you a load of results. For "free photos" you get the following (somewhat predicatable) results - I've edited out the more offensive ones (the number are the number of searches):

42362 free photo
21551 free sex photo
15100 free nude photo
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2513 free photo editing software
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2058 free nude woman photo
1943 free photo shop filter
1935 free baby photo contest
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1838 free personals with photo
1696 royalty free stock photo
1654 free photo hosting
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1057 free photo of naked woman
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1038 free photo contest
924 free photo editing
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879 free download photo
877 free nude photo gallery
848 free pamela anderson photo
835 free photo shop plugins
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802 dirty free photo
799 free erotic photo
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775 download editor free microsoft photo
766 naturist photo free
743 free photo photography royalty stock stock
724 free photo program
720 free girl photo
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671 free teen photo
665 free downloads photo
630 free hardcore photo
618 free desktop photo
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604 free celeb nude photo
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592 free photo shop template
585 free garter nylons photo
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568 free photo of people
552 free adobe photo shop tutorial
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540 abuse free iraq photo prisoner
534 5.0 adobe download free photo shop
526 free gallery male photo
525 free online photo storage
524 free web photo site
524 free photo wife
508 editing free photo ware
501 photo shop free software
499 free mature woman photo
498 asian free photo

With a bit more playing about you could maybe see what are the most popular searches and try and find a .com address that is close/matches.

[James]

OK, I am now the owner of:

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net and http://www.freedigitalphotos.co.uk

The .net registration was much more expensive than co.uk. The total invoice just for the registrations was £27.

I noticed freedigitalimages.net and freedigitalimages.co.uk are also available. If the registration was cheaper I would take those as well, but I'm quite happy with photos.

I spent ages looking for other combinations, checked Overture, checked the multitude of domain name generators, but nothing could come close to what I've gone with.

If you think I should seriously consider taking freedigitalimages as well, let me know.

I used 123-reg.co.uk for the registrations. ukreg.com was slow and poorly thought out (I went right through the checkout only to be refused registration as I hadn't already bought "domain credits" - these are mentioned but it doesn't say you MUST buy them up front. Rubbish, I went elsewhere.).

I'm not going to look for a host just yet, I'll test the concept on some existing webspace (which will be used up very quickly). I have already made over 300 images for the site.

How should I tackle this? Should I submit a project plan now? I remember Tom changed his mind and said I should "just do it" and make it grow. Although originally he has said "hold your horses, planning is everything"). I have a plan, but it's in my head, not on paper.

Cheers

[Tom]

I did all-science subjects at school and then studied the scientific method (as part of social science) at university. From all this, the thing which stands out is my memory of how to get a good mark for doing a titration in chemistry. I found it necessary to start with the results and then work back to the data. In reading more about the philosophy of science, I have found this to be not-untypical of what scientists actually do. They frequently leap to a correct conclusion and then spend years assembling the evidence before writing a paper which pretends that they (1) did a literature search (2) formulated a hypothesis (3) tested the hypothesis (4) proved the thesis.

This is a long way of saying that you should just get the heck on with it - but be prepared to put the whole process into a proper 'scientific' procedure at the end of day, blending in as much research and testing as you can manage.

Hope this helps!

Tom