I’ve been thinking recently about generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). These are Top Level Domains (TLDs) that are not associated with a country such as .us (United States) or .co.uk. (United Kingdom). Here are some of my thoughts:

.musuem – a bit verbose; I love museums, but I never thought they would want or need their own gTLD. Why not bookstores or coffee shops? I can see it now: www.starbucks.coffee. But what is there to stop the proliferation of niche gTLDs? And is this the proliferation of niche gTLDs a bad thing? Not in my opinion.

.pro – bad idea, but only a bad idea becuase of its restrictive rules. I’m a pro at what I do. So are consultants, engineers, programmers, professors, construction workers, waiters, chefs and teachers. It’s presumptuous for these domains to be limited to lawyers and doctors and the like, if not insulting. This domain could have been the next .com in my opinion if its rules limited its use where less restrictive.

.jobs and .aero – Makes sense. Self explanatory.

.coop – for Co-ops. This TLD seems to have pretty good potential for creative domain hacks.

.cat – for Catalan related websites – seems fair as Catalonia is part of Spain. Will this inspire other groups in other countries seek their own TLDs?

And what about .dog?

Today I had lunch with a colleague from another interactive agency, and the topic of pay-per-click came up. We started into a discussion about the inconsistent emphasis placed on pay-per-click (PPC) over natural rankings. While both of our agencies provide these services to our clients we began to wonder why it seems that 80% of the interactive marketing budgets go to 20% of the search traffic, while only 20% of the budgets are applied to where 80% of the search traffic originates from.

Is it because PPC provides immediate gratification? Is it because natural rankings appear too difficult to affect change? Perhaps a combination of factors? Regardless, I think it is time that people realize that natural rank is not impossible to influence. While I’m not the first person to state the obvious, it needs to be restated. CONTENT IS KING!

Depending on the products or services you offer, PPC might make sense; however free traffic always makes sense. Pull back on your PPC budgets and use that money to hire content writers, ghost bloggers or technical writers. These professionals will get you far more mileage for your online marketing dollars.

Public perception of web development / web design is very interesting. I’m routinely surprised by well educated, seasoned business professionals whom believe software can be developed quickly at a very low cost.

Occasionally, I run into executives who have dabbled in Frontpage and now claim professional experience in web development. When confronted by such individuals I often resort to analogies to help bring home the reality of our line of work.

In such a situation the analogy of the dog house vs the sky-scraper works well. When it comes to building websites you need to define the scope of your project against a real-world tangible object. Are you building a dog house or sky-scrapper?

Most people are skilled enough to build a web-page. There are a myriad of tools available to allow almost anyone to design and publish content to the web. Perhaps it is not beautiful, easy to use or well coded but hey, it works. However, very few of us are able to build a house, let alone a sky-rise or Sears Tower.

Next time, when confronted with questions that relate  to scope or complexity, let your customers know if you are building a dog house or sky-scraper!

If you are looking at driving traffic and attention to your products or services then maybe doing higher quality work is the answer.

Case in Point.
We recently were recognized by CommArts for a Site of the Week for Sept 18th, 2006 for our work on OolongTees.com. In just 2 days of free publicity we managed to equal our regular monthly totals in visitor traffic.

Typically, we spend close to $2000 per month on driving traffic to our site via pay-per-click and print mailers. Our homepage clickthru rate has jumped from 38% to over 65% in just two days.

From this data it is easy to justify how going beyond client expectations is both a good thing for the client and the service / product provider.

After the architecture and logic of an application, comments are the most important factor for scalable, efficient, and reusable code.

Any developer who has worked on large, long-term, or evolving projects understand the value of commented code. Any developer who hasn’t should too: just about every coding book, in every programming language, advises it.

I’ve recently (re)developed a few legacy projects with less-than-perfect code. By itself, this is fine - I work through the logic the code and figure out the code’s intended goals and refine and improve it as I go. But if the previous programmer would have commented his or her intentions - no matter how erroneous or inefficient the code is - the process of improvement and refinement would have taken less time and been more efficient.

Commenting - although it can add negligible time to production - can save countless hours of future maintenance down the line. Comments also help scalability by promoting efficient, well-written code.

So please, write pretty code - very pretty code, if possible - like Martha Stewart would. You’ll save your organization, company, and yourself time, effort, confusion, and money down the road.