Archive for May 2010

It’s been able to get married for almost a decade; and voted in the last two elections, but another important age has been reached: The .com domain name is now 25 years old.

The very first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com, on behalf of ’80s computer maker Symbolics.

That year – 1985 – there were just 5 further domains registered. The growth in domain names remained fairly slow for the next 10 years, and it wasn’t until 1997 that the 1million milestone was reached.

These days and astonishing 100,000 domain names registered every day, and a total of 86m that are active. A further 113m .com websites have come and gone.

Falling costs

The low early numbers was partly down to the cost. A domain name cost several hundred pounds. Not so any more – you can register a .com domain name with WebEden for  £11.99 a year.

Some domain names have gone on to be worth a lot more than their original registration cost – as we saw with our coverage of the world’s most expensive domain name.

Not many left

With 86 million domains in circulation, there have been worries that there are not enough domain names left. In fact, there are just 35,000 unregistered single word .com or .net domain names remaining. You can see them all – and be inspired to snap them up – over at lastwordsleft.com.

What happened to Symbolics.com?

What about Symbolics, that domain name pioneer? They went bust a few years ago, although the domain has been snapped up by a speculator.

Do you own a great domain name? Are you interested in speculating in the online real estate of domains? Leave us a comment below.

After a freezing winter and a patchy spring, in the last few days hot weather has arrived. And warm weather brings a change in leisure activities.

To start with, people are spending less time at their computers. To show you what I mean, here’s a graph of visitors to the WebEden.co.uk website over the last 7 days – just look how it dips on Friday (the 1st baking day)

The weather also affects what people are searching for on Google.

Let’s have a BBQ!

According to data released from UK online traffic monitoring company Hitwise, there’s been a spike in searches for that Brit favourite the Barbeque.

In April there were an incredible 3,500 different search terms containing the word ‘bbq’. Here are the top ones by volume:

1. bbq (4.1% of all searches containing ‘bbq’)

2. weber bbq (3.1%)

3. gas bbq (2.2%)

4. outback bbq (1.5%)

5. webber bbq (1.1%)

6. cobb bbq (1.1%)

7. charcoal bbq (0.9%)

8. cadac bbq (0.9%)

9. gas bbq sale (0.9%)

10. weber bbq uk (0.9%)

What’s interesting here is the seasonal change of search volumes for particular keywords. This – combined with how highly you rank for particular keywords – will of course affect the amount of visitors that search engines bring to your website.

When is traffic highest for you?

For most businesses, traffic is highest from Jan to the end of March; and then again from September to November. If you’re a retailer, then the chances are you get most visitors in the lead up to Christmas, and the sale period immediately after. And if you run a holiday lettings or travel website then your chance of grabbing traffic will be during the periods into the lead up to school holidays. It’s important to take these factors into account when you know how to make a website.

Which market do you operate in? Have you noticed a change in search volumes to your website? How have you taken advantage of this? Leave us a comment below.

Yet another Website of the Week.

This time we’ve got  jenkinsonassociates.co.uk from Chartered Surveyors, Architectural and Building Consultants Jenkinson Associates.

There’s lots to like about this site. It’s clean, crisp, and the colour palette is very restful on the eye. There’s good use of images on the homepage, and the image gallery provides an effective showcase the architectural drawings. The contact details are clear on every page, and there’s good use of Industry trust marks. They’ve also added social bookmarking buttons – a good marketing touch.

Website Address:

http://jenkinsonassociates.co.uk

When did you build your website?

Last month

Why did you build a website?

My stepfather wanted a better site than the crappy one he had done by BT

What do you like best about your website?

The fresh design and ease of use

What is your best website building tip?

Make sure you use good SEO otherwise your site will never appear in Google searches. Mine didn’t for 2 months until lots of tweaking was done.

Last year we ran a story that talked about the possibility of websites getting an age rating. This year ISP Tibboh has teamed up with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to turn that idea into a reality.

The ISP is using web filtering technology in order to automatically rate websites. Parents using the ISP can then set their Internet connection to only view websites above a particular rating: U, PG, 12, 15 or 18.

Got a Dongle?

At the moment the service is only available using a 3G dongle, charged at £20 a month. And if there are different members of the family requiring different levels of filter, those can be set by registering alternative user profiles.

So what classification do websites end up having?

Here are a few of the more well know ones

Facebook:12
Twitter:    12
Google:    12
Bing:        12
BBC:         U
telegraph.co.uk    U
Guardian.co.uk     U
Microsoft.com      U
Sky.com               PG
Wordpress:          15

So far Tibboh reckons they have rated around 3 billion websites.

MD Phil Dawson said that “91%t of parents said they wanted BBFC classifications online. This really helps because parents instinctively understand what the U, PG, 12, 15 and 18 levels mean,”

Do you think its a good idea? Are you making a website? What age rating would your website get? Leave us a comment below.

Google have created an archive of Tweets that you can search through. The archive shows what people were saying on a topic at a point in history, and the volume of comments too.

Google say they have created this archive as they say it provides great insight into events as they happened, and how people reacted to them.

To find the new tool, choose ‘updates’ from the left hand menu of the new look Google results page. At the top of the page is a chart which looks like this:

You can click on a point in the timeline and check out the Tweets that were being published.

The screengrab example above looks at the pattern of ‘golden gate park’ tweets. There’s a daily spike in mentions each afternoon, probably because people are more likely to be in the park. There’s a big peak on the 27th March, which is explained by the very sunny weather in San Francisco that day – more people were talking about going to the park.

You can replay any type of Tweets – try taking a look at some that are relevant and local to you. What did you find? Leave us a comment below.

There’s a story over on Search Engine Land that discusses the number of searches carried out on Twitter every month. This is following the redesign on the Twitter homepage to make the service more search focused.

At the Twitter Chirp conference Co founder Ev Williams said that the service is handling a massive 19 billion searches per month. That, incredibly, is more than Bing and Yahoo combined. And that’s from a service that is in reality just 3 years old.

Here’s the official monthly search figures of all the top players, according to comScore:

Google: 88 billion per month
Twitter: 19 billion per month
Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Google numbers are for more than just the search engine, and include those for images, maps and –crucially – YouTube). As you can see, Twitter is now in position 2.

However, there are a few holes in Twitter figures. For a starter they’re self reporting. Secondly, those searches are often made by third party applications such as desktop clients tweetdeck and Seesmic.

And thirdly – and most significantly – many are ‘standing queries’ that are being carried out on a users behalf. For example, one of my columns in Tweetdeck is a search for ‘webeden’, so I can have a look to see if anyone is mentioning us. I’m not making that search every day, but did it once when I set up Tweetdeck. But now Tweetdeck is carrying out that search on my behalf every 150 seconds throughout the day.

Last but not least, many users choose to display their Twitter profile or a keyword search on their websites. (If you want to do this watch our tutorial on how to put your Twitter profile on your website). In these cases it’s the actual websites that are making constant, standing searches on Twitter.

So the figure of 19bn might be not quite what we’d understand as 19bn if it was searches being carried out on one of the traditional search engines. They aren’t all individual varied searches for information, products or services.

As for the actual Twitter Search page, it contributes just ‘ a few million’ searches per months. Here’s our in depth guide on how to search on Twitter.

Do you find Twitter search useful? Were you even aware it existed? Leave us a comment below.

Time for another Website of the Week!

There are quite a few surfing websites that have been built with the WebEden Website builder, and cresseyssurfacademy.com is one of my favourites. As I sit in front of my PC, surounded by ringing phones and tapping keyboards, its great to gaze on such appealing images as people surfing.

This site is really rich with images, video, maps, forms and content. The design is very fresh and engaging, just the right image for a surf outfit.

Website Address:

www.cresseyssurfacademy.com

When did you build your website?

June 2009

Why did you build a website?

To promote my husband’s mobile surf school that had just launched along the South Wales coast, following a successful year of private coaching.

What do you like best about your website?

It’s bright, funky, easy to navigate, full of information, useful videos and great photos. Plus people seem to love it!

What is your best website building tip?

Be creative – there are too many practical but dull and uninspiring sites out there. Plus keep it updated regularly to encourage people back. Create a sense of community and belonging. Be clear and informative. Use great images that speak for you. Actually that’s 5 tips!

You heard it here first. Online shopping is going to overtake in-store shopping as the main place that people make purchases. That’s according to a report produced by communications agency Likemind and Vision Critical.

As many as 90% of UK consumers search for their latest purchase online. And in-store shopping was carried out by just 8% more people than offline shopping last year.

It’s about Customer Service

When it comes to customer service, 48% reckon they had a better experience online than in the shop. And it was older people – those aged 55 and over – who most strongly preferred online customer service.

The study – although small (just 2,000 UK consumers) -  underlines how important it is to not only get your website right, but market it well and deliver good customer service.

You probably won’t be reading this unless you’ve used our website builder to create a website. So the first part is probably covered. But what about driving visitors to that website? Take a look at our Search Engine Optimisation guide for thorough advice on how to boost your website higher on Google.

And as for customer service, it’s important to make sure details such as your phone number, address and email address very obvious on your site. Twitter is proving an increasingly important channel to deliver customer service. Here’s a guide on how to sign up to Twitter.

Do you run an online and an offline business? Has the ratio of sales skewed towards online? Leave us a comment below.

The body that oversees all online advertising has produced a set of figures that appear to defy the world’s sluggish economy.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), US advertising revenue smashed through $6.3bn in the last quarter of 2009. That’s 2.6% higher than the same period in 2008, and 14% up on the previous quarter.

Advertising on Search Engines continues to be the most popular form, where 47% of all online ad spend flows. This is followed by traditional banner advertising which takes a further 35% Digital video grew by a whopping 39% from 2008 to 2009.

Here’s the full table:

WebEden lets you take advantage of the money flowing into advertising. Watch our video tutorial on how to put Google AdSense to your website.

Do you spend money online advertising your website? What’s been your pattern of spending over the last couple of years? Leave us a comment below.

We’ve recently covered lots of stories about just how big Facebook has become. The world’s most popular social networking service now has over 400m users and is now the world’s most visited website.

Facebook is headed by 27 year old Mark Zuckerberg, who claimed to have come up with the idea whilst studying at Harvard.

But that’s not the view of two of his erstwhile study-mates who reckon that it was their idea first. Facebook must have been spooked by what Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss were saying, since they paid them an estimated to $65m to consider ‘the matter concluded’.

ConnectU

The Winkelvoss brothers say that Facebook is basically a copy of their startup ‘ConnectU’. And now they’ve just said that despite the pay off they’re going to continue to pursue a legal battle against Facebook.

Both brothers rowed in the Boat race for Oxford, and say that “It’s our duty to stand for principles. We’re willing to wait around and make sure that’s what right has been made right.”

All 3 started ConnectU back in 2003, but Zuckerberg then moved to launch a similar site called ‘thefacebook.com’ which became hugely popular across the Harvard campus.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Facebook for its part told the BBC: “The settlement has been enforced by the courts and attempts to delay that decision have been denied twice.

“We hope that discussion of spurious and false allegations and other matters that were concluded years ago are not distracting anyone from their preparations for the race. We consider the matter concluded.”

Back in 1998 I myself thought up a ‘look for’ mechanism whereby I could organise the world’s online information. I came up with the name Goggle. I might take that idea up again some day…