Melbourne gets a new internet identity

.Melbourne a new domain name space for the city was approved by ICANN over the weekend. It is the first of over 40 names that were applied for by Australian applicants and one of 1,930 application received from around the world. Other Australian applications are for names like .afl, .auspost and .anz – all from fairly obvious applicants.

Bigger change is coming

It’s going to be an interesting change in the landscape over the next couple of years. We’re all used to addresses like CompanyName.com.au or perhaps just CompanyName.com, while there have been a few additions to the internet naming system over the past 10 years none that have made a real impact for most businesses.

With almost two thousand new domain name suffixes applied for there will surely be a solid few that will make some kind of impact in the short term. Already other cities like  London, Tokyo and New York have also secured their own domain names there will be more to come.

It’s not all about cities or regions getting their space online either browse the list of names here you will get a feel for the variety on offer – it’s extensive! Some of the names will have straight forward and predicable uses ( .Windows / .Shop / .Sex ), I’m interested in what will be done with .Space - web sites that are out of this world? (Sorry couldn’t resist that)

What are the opportunities?

I think the number one opportunity for internet users is choice. A business wanting an online presence can choose from a huge variety of domain names suffix to best represent their needs. A restaurant operating in Melbourne I’m sure would love to brand itself around a web site like CitySeafood.Melbourne.

For those who are keen on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) think of what a domain name GreatSeafood.Melbourne could do for your ranking. I’m sure the likes of Google will begin to take into account these new domain names when they are indexing sites.

How to get involved

Right now it’s still a bit of a waiting game. August 2013 ICANN will release all of the results of the applications. Their dates have slipped a number of times so that could change. Then the successful applicants have to go about setting up their registries so they can begin to sell these new domain names.

There are a variety of methods that registries in the past have used to open up a new domain space, commonly they will have a period of time where they will take orders for new domains then process them, suffice to say it will be lot of ‘first come, best dressed’.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this space over the next 12 months to see how it evolves, even just as a web users it will be interesting to see the new names come into existence. Move over .com your time in the sun is coming to an end!

Just for the record, the NSW Government has also applied for .Sydney so we’re not left in the cold!

This one I think is so good that it’s time to share it here.

HelpScout.net provide a brilliant email support system, it’s what we use here at The DMA to manage our client support emails, they have a blog that regularly has good information on custom support, web sites etc.. this post however is one to bookmark if you build sites and if you own a site a good list of things to check out on yours.

Two points that I was most interested in:

• The section “Incorporate Directional Cues” is really interesting, make sure you read that section
• And! a section on the dreaded “fold” – links to more info that keeping information “above the fold” actually makes no difference at all

Go read it now!   “10 Proven Ways to Build a Website that Customers Will Love”

image credit: HelpScout.net

Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t get it. They think building a website is one thing on a long list of To Dos, when it’s done it’s ticked off and not thought of again.

Today in the Sydney Morning Herald, there is a story “Online Sales reach a trillion“, it’s a big number and easy to gloss over. The story goes on to say that Australia’s part of this one trillion ($USD) is about $US36.2 billion. That again is a big number and should be enough to make you as a website owner think “how much of that revenue came via my website”?

If that’s not enough to get you excited and re-thinking your online strategy here’s another statisitc from the same piece and for me I think is the more important fact because it demonstrates that the ‘buying online’ trend is only getting bigger…

“More than 10 million people, or almost half the population, bought something online in 2012, spending an average of $3,547 per person”

So, what to do?

Get an idea on what is happening on your WordPress site right now.

Each time we publish a WordPress website before we hand over the keys we setup Google Analytics. It is the best way to have a quick health check of the traffic coming to your site as well as what is happening when your visitors arrive. If you’d like to learn more about using Google Analytics talk to us to arrange some training.

If your website was designed and built more then 18 months ago, it’s worth checking that it is keeping up with the changing face of the web. We’ve blogged about Responsive Design a few times in the last year, have a quick review of these posts to ensure you understand what it’s all about. With more and more users visiting your website on smart phones and tablets it’s important that yours performs well on these tools.

Earlier this year there was a similar article “Net customers with a smarter site“, again from the Sydney Morning Herald talking about the huge uptake in mobile traffic and mobile e-commerce – it’s also worth a read to get your inspired!

“I don’t sell anything on my website”

Just because you don’t sell products or services directly via your website does not mean that none of this applies!

Every website has an enquiry form, maybe that’s the unit of measurement for you – how many enquiries are you getting? It doesn’t even have to be about sales or enquires. For more than one of our Digital Marketing clients we promote job vacancies via their website – so for them getting a good candidate on the line is a measurement of success.

Feeling overwhelmed?

We regularly get clients come back to us for advice. All of the partners at TheDMA have started and run online businesses for many years, come and have a chat, perhaps with a little guidance we can get you back on track and help you grab your share of online sales.

Well this week’s launch site will be a good one to show off in future! We’ve just built a new WordPress theme for Reefcatchments.com.au and it’s anything but a template looking web site!

Click on the image below to load up a larger screen shot to see for yourself!

When doing this we always create a strong password (something like: Jfgi44$2@FDhdheo9SWhfewg ) almost without fail though it gets a reaction – “What is that?”.

WordPress like any other online system is susceptible to password break-ins, weak passwords mean that it is easy for a hacker to break the password and gain access to the site. While we do install of lot of other measures to keep our WordPress sites secure, if the passwords used by users are not strong then it’s only a matter of time before problems arise.

This week, we came across this cool tool “How Secure is my Password” - http://howsecureismypassword.net - basically you enter a password and it gives you an estimate of how long a normal PC would take to break the password.

It’s a bit of an eye opener! Think about updating your password to being something a little stronger!

2 quick tips

1. Your password doesn’t have to be A word, if it’s easier use a sentence eg thegreenfroghas27Spots – pretty easy to remember and a relatively solid password
2. Try a password manager on your computer, there are a lot of them available now and some have smartphone apps that mean you can take your passwords with you and sync them eg 1password.com (Mac and Windows)

And now it’s available, “Radiant” is available from Amazon’s online store here.

Visit Belinda’s web site for the book here, view the trailer and story synopsis. [Yes, she's built it on WordPress, we've trainer her well ]

We will be rolling out the update for all of our hosted customers over the next week. Having chosen to wait until the stable release 3.5.1 has been published before updating the majority of our client sites there should be little or no interruption to the smooth running of your WordPress website.

The new WordPress 3.5.1 update has a lot of great features, we’ve summarised here some of the main areas where WordPress has improved:

• Improved Media Uploader – You can create batch insertion and you can handle images on galleries easily.  Uploading images is simply a matter of drag and drop from your computer and the entire media uploader interfaces has been overhauled to make the entire process of working with images inside WordPress easier

• Retina Ready Dashboard – Users with new retina enabled screen (Macbook Pro and current model iPads) will notice that the entire WordPress Dashboard looks crisp and sharp on those hi res displays

• Instagram, Slideshare, Sound Cloud using oEmbed – You can now embed content from these third party sites into your WordPress website without needing to write any html code, iFrames or shortcodes – read our post on oEmbed with WordPress

If you experience any problems with your website after this update, please login to the member’s area of our site here to lodge a support ticket.

In this quick example I’m going to demonstrate how to embed a video from the popular video service Vimeo. If YouTube is your thing, this exact same process will work with videos hosted there as well.

Visit the video you’d like to use and copy the URL from the address bar of your web browser.

Then paste that URL (something http://vimeo.com/38612292) into the editor in WordPress, making sure that the URL is on a line all by itself. Then update your post and view it and you’ll see the video (magically) embedded into your site.

I’ve done the embed here so you can see what how it turns out.

Easy huh?!

This functionality allows you to embed photos, videos, sounds and much more into your WordPress content. Say no to pasting in long chunks of HTML code and say hello to this new simplicity.

WordPress 3.5 adds the likes of Instagram, Soundcloud and Facebook to the existing sites that were previously supported (Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter etc.. )

So what’s oEmbed all about?

In short you simply get the URL (website address) of the object that you would like to embed in your WordPress page or post, for example a YouTube video, and paste that into the WordPress editor. WordPress will then recognise this and instead of showing the URL it will show the object you have embedded.

Let’s look at an example – Instagram

Instagram – It is a photo sharing website that is increasing in popularity.

Step 1: Pick an Instagram photo and copy the URL

Step 2: Paste the URL to the WordPress page or post – in the main editor

Step 3: Save your page and view it in the front end to see what happens.

Below is that very same image embedded right here in this blog post, so you can see exactly how it turns out!

There’s not much more to it than that.

One thing to keep in mind though is that the URL of the embedded object must be on a line by itself in the WordPress editor.

What to see more?

Ok we’ve done another example, this time with a video from the popular video sharing service vimeo. Check out How to embed video into your WordPress pages or posts right here.

The DMA offices will be closed from noon 20th December (yes we’re off to have our Christmas party!) and we will be returning January 7th.

We very much hope all of our clients and partners have a great break and look forward to doing it all again in 2013!