Singapore Web Hosting Blog

i was reading a newsletter where the the author listed most well known domain deals in the past few years:

Amount Year Domain
12,000,000 - 2006 - sex.com
7,500,000 - 1999 - business.com
5,500,000 - 2003 - casino.com
5,000,000 - 2002 - asseenontv.com
5,000,000 - 1999 - korea.com
3,500,000 - 1996 - worldwideweb.com
3,350,000 - 1999 - altavista.com
3,300,000 - 1999 - wine.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - eshow.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - loans.com
2,750,000 - 2004 - creditcards.com

good domain name costs millions.

but good short crispy domain name is hard to find nowadays. in the past, i recommended clients to always consider keyword rich domain names when short one-or-two-word domain is not available.

for example, if webhosting.com.sg is taken, and yes it’s taken long time ago, go for singaporewebhosting.com, if singaporewebhosting.com is taken, you can even consider bestsingaporewebhosting.com. you get the idea.

the reason was, keyword rich domain name is descriptive and may help search engine ranking a bit. it’s long and ugly, but the problem is, the shorter ones are taken. since you have to get a long domain, why not make it keyword rich?

now things have changed. and i’ve changed my mind.

always go for a brandable domain name. something easy to read out loud, easy to type into the address bar, easy to remember, something short.

so instead of bestsingaporewebhosting.com, get, for example, i did not check availability of domain name below, hostingstudio.com.sg, wehost.com.sg, mysghosting.com, trustedsg.com, etc. or maybe your unique company name which does not include “web” or “hosting” at all.

why? provide clients convenience and quality service, not anything else. brandable domain name is good for visitors, and in the end will be good for your business.

i just turned on comment feature of this blog yesterday.

it’s common to have comments enabled on most blogs. when i read other blogs, i find it very interesting to read comments as well. those who read blog are serious about the business. heck, you won’t read my blog if your not serious about your web site, will you? i do not post gossip, hot pictures, hot topic in town, etc. just internet stuffs. and it can be boring reading such blog unless you want to build a profitable online business.

anyway, back to topic. the comment feature was on by default when i started blogging last year. however before i found any human readers from stats, i saw tens of comment spams here. well that was fast.

spammers use software to scan all type of things they can spam, email addresses, forums, blogs, guestbooks, newsgroup, etc. then they spam you with those commonly seen spam messages nowadays, burn fat, drug, get rich quick, poker… the list goes on and on and on.

at that time, there’s not much real readers to my blog. it’s just kind of fun stuff for me, i have no plan to promote my blog. i don’t have much readers even now, but there are some coz i can see from server log file.

although i don’t really get what is web2.0, however experts say blog is part of web2.0, and one of the core spirit of web2.0 is community and interactive. so here you go. i added security code and turn comments on. your welcome to post comments.

the anti-spam plugin works fine so far, no blog spam received in last 12 hours. finger crossed.

in order to make your web site load faster, besides image compression, using html authoring software, you can also optimize your html files. these are rather boring technical stuff, but will absolutely benefit your web sites.

* use CSS - CSS reduces the amount of markup in html, and you can put it as external file so that it won’t be loaded everytime.
* use valid markup - valid markups stop browsers from having to perform “error correction” when parsing the html.
* specify image and table sizes (height and width) - so that browser can display web pages before image or table is downloaded (as it can immediately determine the height and width of your images and tables).
* remove unnecessary stuff - leading whitespace, extra blank lines, comments…
* cut down on bells and whistles - cool javascript menu, buttons, graphics, music, animated gif, flash, etc. do they serve specific purpose there? or just for fun?
* split page into multiple pages if it’s too long - you have more pages at the same time.
* minimize the number of files referenced - so that the number of HTTP connections required to download a page is lowered.
* replace table-based layout with divs - if your good at CSS.
* avoid nested tables - if you have to use it.
* use external files - CSS, javascripts, etc.

goal: optimized file size - the total size of all the files of your web page (graphic, script, html, etc.) should be small enough to download quickly. get it below 30kb if possible. 20kb is better. smaller than 10kb is best.

i know many web designers will laugh at this figure. 30kb or 20kb for a modern web page? no way! my cool logo alone takes 20kb…

well, what’s the point if visitors do not want to wait for your cool logo?

pages that take forever to download is no. 1 of my top 10 web design mistakes.