.xxx domains became available for general availability registration yesterday morning. The .xxx extension is designed for use in the Adult Entertainment Industry, however some institutions are choosing to also register their current web domains in the .xxx extension to mitigate reputation risk. This is similar to registering your domain in .com, .net, .org and others to protect your online identity from being impugned. This is generally called defensive domain name registration.
If you are choosing to register your domains with the .xxx extensions, CU*Answers Web Services can do that for you. Registering these domains does not point them to your website, but rather makes them non-resolvable, so they basically become dead ends on the Internet. .xxx domains are $125 per year per domain ($100 is a straight cost pass through from the domain registrar.)
If this is something you would like to pursue, please let us know which domains you would like to register through our normal web update process. We are only planning on registering for 1 year so we can re-evaluate the domain name landscape next year.
CU*Answers Web Services has a planned maintenance window on Tuesday morning (8/16/2011) from 5:00 am – 8:00 am ET. Client websites and email services may experience intermittent downtime (10-15 minute intervals) during this window. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
If you are getting an error on your website (or really any application) or you are seeing a funny browser rendering issue on your website, it helps us to see a screenshot. This lets us see exactly what you are seeing. Taking a screenshot is really easy and helps us out, especially when we can’t duplicate what you are seeing.
Lifehacker has a nice series called Emailable Tech Support. They are simple and concise instructions on how to do certain computer tasks. Last week they covered taking screenshots. Take a read through to see how easy it is.
Here’s a tip from Joost de Valk, author of the WordPress SEO Plugin we use on several WordPress with SiteControl sites. Back in the early days of search engines to get ranked you added keywords to each page to tell the search engine what your website was about. As you can imagine, this quickly got abused and search engines began ignoring them, since they were essentially useless.
None of the big three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) put much weight behind the meta keywords, so in Joost’s opinion, and Web Services, it’s just not worth the time to fill out, and then manage. Instead, spend your time writing good content. Good content that talks about the search terms you want to be found for. If you want your website to be indexed for “best loan rates in Kalamazoo, Michigan” then you need to have a story (not an image banner) explaining that you do in fact have the best loan rates in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If you don’t write it in your content, the search engines won’t know it, and can’t point people to your site.
Read the article on Joost’s site.
For more tips from Google on getting your site indexed, check out the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
Over the past weekend WordPress passed the 50 million mark. That’s right, there are over 50 million websites on the web that are powered by WordPress. That’s nearly 20% of the entire web. WordPress powers such heavyweight sites like TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and the National Football League, and also many of your Credit Union websites.
Rest assured your are in good company, and CU*Answers Web Services is right here with you.
DNS or Domain Name System is what makes the Internet human friendly. Its a core set of technology that maps the domain names you know (cuanswers.com) to the actual IP address that your computer cares about. You can think of it as asking for directions to the “local grocery store” and DNS telling you it’s at “123 Main Street.”
It’s a behind the scenes system that you don’t really appreciate until its not working. It’s also one of the more confusing aspects about the Internet and how it works.
Smashing Magazine has a good introduction to DNS and how it works. It also outlines what DNS is, how it works and includes some tips on moving websites.
Web Services works with DNS everyday. Sometimes we forget that its not technology that everyone is comfortable with, so this article is a good primer in case you hear us talking about terms you aren’t familiar with.