Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News & Website Stuff

Domain Name Industry News and Website Stuff

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.Best top level domain sold to entrepreneur who wants to make it a cryptocurrency play

by — Uncategorized 7 Comments

Adding crypto to a new TLD? Why not.

PeopleBrowsr has sold the top level domain name .best to The Best SAS, a Paris based company led by Cyril Fremont.

According to a release, .best will become “a core component of a core component of a decentralized search optimized social network, where participants will be rewarded with .Best cryptocurrency for reviewing best in class products and services.:

“We are giving the consumer their own domain name, an integrated website where they own the data, and rewards for their contribution to the community. Platforms like ours continue to move negotiating power between reviewers and sellers,” said Cyril Fremont.

It seems that the goal is to have people review products on .best domain names and reward them with the company’s cryptocurrency.

The Best SAS is owned in part by PREMLEAD, an online marketing company creates leads using a network of over 50,000 websites.

I’ll give this idea points for innovation, something that has mostly been lacking when it comes to new top level domain names.

PeopleBrowsr also runs the .CEO domain name and the “dot brand” domain .kred. None of its top level domains have proven successful, with both .CEO and .Best having about 2,500 names in their zone files.

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ICANN Working Group: Registrants Must Retain the Right to Defend Their Domains in Court

by — Policy & Law 3 Comments

In this post, the Internet Commerce Association provides an update on a plan to give IGOs special privileges related to domain names.

Should domain name registrants’ fundamental right, the right to go to court to overrule a UDRP decision transferring their domain name, be taken away? That was one of the primary questions that an ICANN Working Group was mandated to answer. The confusingly named ICANN IGO-INGO Access to Curative Rights Protection Mechanisms (the “Working Group”) has been examining and reviewing this issue since 2013 and just issued its Final Report.

ICANN had been considering creating a new dispute resolution system, just for Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s) such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the World Customs Organization, and also for International Non-governmental Organizations (INGO’s), such as Good Neighbours International (GNI), CARE, and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN). These organizations and many others who use acronyms and common words in their names, would be interested in any new system that would allow them to take away corresponding domain names from registrants. Some IGOs believed that they should have first right to domains that matched their acronym, even in .com, such as to the domain WHO.com.

The Working Group was presented with, as one option, a new dispute resolution system that would be “final”, without recourse by a registrant to go to court to overturn an unfair decision. Although such a proposal has been previously raised and rejected, the Government Advisory Committee (GAC), pushed hard for it to be reconsidered. IGOs in particular argued that they currently enjoy immunity from going to court for most kinds of disputes, and wanted that immunity extended to domain name disputes. Their rationale was that as intergovernmental organizations, their immunity from being subjected to courts of any particular nation was imperative, and the UDRP as currently enacted requires all complainants to submit to a court’s jurisdiction for any dispute challenging a UDRP transfer order. Accordingly, IGOs claimed that they could not effectively use the UDRP as it would require them to waive their immunity. Click here to continue reading…

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Building a site on Squarespace

by — Services 1 Comment

Hopefully you read my overview of sitebuilders including Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. In today’s post, I’m going to explain how I built a site on Squarespace.

(I want to be clear up front that I’m not ranking the site builders. I built different types of sites on each service, and my goal is to explain how the process worked for me.)

I used a newly-registered domain name for my site: Bartending.school. It was a premium domain name, but the $220-a-year price tag seemed reasonable given the high search volumes for bartending school topics.

Like the other site builders, Squarespace didn’t ask me about a domain name before I got started. Instead, I selected a template and started building the site. It wasn’t until I was ready to publish that I had to select my domain and pay for anything.

Building

I selected a template and started building out my site. Overall, Squarespace was extremely easy to learn and use. There were a couple of site design procedures that confused me a bit, such as editing the top menu and the sections of the website. In one instance, I couldn’t figure out how to exit out of a screen and ended up hitting the back button. But Squarespace has good help pages that walked me through the few hurdles I faced.

I particularly like the ease of making sitewide changes to fonts and text sizes through the style editor.

Change text size, color and font sitewide through the Style Editor.

My site takes advantage of regular pages as well as blog pages. Squarespace’s built-in blog system has few of the bells and whistles you get with WordPress. But, keeping with the simplicity, it’s easy to use.

The Squarespace blog editor.

Blog pages are also compatible with AMP, which could help you get more traffic for Google.

While Wix has “apps” that can be plugged into your site similar to what Shopify offers, all of Squarespace’s apps (called integrations) are available by default. You can see them here.

I spent quite a bit of time building the site because I drafted all of the content from scratch. But once I got the hang of Squarespace, adding new content was very easy.

 

Packages

Squarespace makes you pay before you can publish (some competitors let you published a branded-site on a subdomain without paying).

Here’s the pricing for regular (not e-commerce) websites:

Personal Plan – $16 a month or $144 a year.
Business Plan – $26 a month or $216 a year.

The business plan adds additional features including the ability to add some customized code to your header and in the site. It also comes with some ecommerce capabilities, although for those you might want to opt for one of the dedicated e-commerce packages.

The customized code injection and code blocks in the business plan will be necessary if you want to add third-party javascript widgets such as Adsense. But, as with all of these site builders, you can’t edit code line-by-line.

It’s worth noting that Squarespace doesn’t offer email. Instead, it has a partnership with Google to offer G Suite’s basic plan. This is typical for site builders.

After selecting a plan, I connected my domain bartending.school to the website by adding DNS records at my domain registrars. A free domain comes with all annual packages. (Of course, not a premium one like bartending.school.)

Publishing and Promoting

Once your site is built, any changes you make to the site will instantly be published when you save them.

Squarespace integrates directly with Google Search Console. Once your site is built you can click a few buttons to add it to Search Console. Your sitemap will automatically be submitted as well.

Once nice feature is that you can access much of your Search Console data from directly within the Analytics section of Squarespace.

Overall

I am very impressed by Squarespace. Just looking at my site, It’s much more professional looking that something I could have created in the same amount of time with WordPress. I can see why a small business would opt to use Squarespace as opposed to WordPress.

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Win free tickets to Merge

by — Services 13 Comments

Want to go to MERGE! in September? Here are some free tickets.

The second annual MERGE! show takes place September 14-19 in Orlando at the Disney Springs Hilton.

Fabulous is sponsoring the hospitality suite this year, and as part of its sponsorship, it has some free tickets to giveaway. I’m helping them give away four of these tickets to DNW readers. Tickets currently cost $499.

You have to do a little bit of sleuthing to win.

To win, you need to be the first person to correctly answer any of the questions below by posting a comment. Only the first person to answer the question wins.

To be clear, there are four tickets and four questions. You win by answering one of them correctly, but you need to be the first person to answer that question correctly.

If you know you can’t go to the conference or already have a ticket, please don’t answer the questions. Also, please only answer one of the questions (unless you find out you answered one incorrectly).

Ready? Here are the questions:

X Which DNW Podcast guest is a Grammy Award winner? ANSWERED: David Ellefson of Megadeth

X What year did Fabulous launch? ANSWERED: 2002

X Which DNW Podcast guest was involved with domain names from the earliest date? ANSWERED: Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the DNS

X What extremely valuable domain names that was previously under management at Fabulous.com sold to Amazon this year? ANSWERED: Prime.com

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Testing out the website builders: Wix, Weebly and Squarespace

by — Services 3 Comments

In the coming days I will review my experience building sites with several popular website builders.

The way in which small businesses get online has changed. It used to be that everyone searched for a domain name as a starting point. Once they registered a domain, they’d build a website.

A handful of web presence companies have turned that model on its head. Wix, Squarespace and Weebly take a site-first approach. They help customers design a website and then link them to a domain name later.

The model is working.

Wix is publicly traded on the Nasdaq (WIX) and has a market cap of nearly $5 billion. In May it reported Q1 revenue of $137.8 million, up 49% year-over-year. It had 3.4 million paying customers at the end of Q1.

There’s not much public data available about Weebly and Squarespace. There will soon be more data about Weebly because it was acquired by publicly-traded Square (NASDAQ: SQ) earlier this year for $365 million.

It’s clear that people are gravitating toward these company’s site-first onramps.

In many ways, it’s not a battle of domain name registrars like GoDaddy (which mostly focus on the domain as the starting point) vs. the site builders. Instead, it’s a battle of WordPress vs. the site builders.

Over the past month or so I’ve tested each of these company’s site builders by building a site on them. I’ve reflected on the experience compared to creating sites on WordPress–something I’ve done since 2005. Here are the advantages of the site builders: Click here to continue reading…

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