 (925) 829-0751 |
May, 2010 |
In This Issue: |
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Over the years, we have seen that our business tends to lead the overall business environment by 4 to 6 months. When we slow down, we can expect to see the general market do the same a few months later. When our business starts to grow, it is usually portends an upswing in business for our customers. As I mentioned in an earlier issue, we have been very busy since November. We hope that our historical trends hold true to form and that this upswing in our business - after a major downturn in the second and third quarters of '09 - means that the economy is about to see a general upturn too. Below are the websites we have launched since January. Nine of the twelve are complete redesigns of existing sites that had grown stale and were no longer effective business tools. In most cases we added Content Management Systems so the owners could maintain the sites themselves and optimized the sites for the search engines. It is interesting to note that, in most cases, our clients wanted to make their sites a much more important part of the business' sales and marketing efforts. Many of them are now redirecting traditional advertising dollars to the web. We frequently see situations where our clients run into trouble with their domain names. We'll get a panic phone call that their website is no longer on the Internet and that their email is not working. This is typically caused by their domain name having expired. When your domain name is due for renewal, your domain name registrar will send you an email notice to renew. If your account record lists an email address that you no longer use, you will never receive any of the notices and your domain name can expire. Registrars usually give you a 30 day grace period that gives you time to things squared away. However, if you delay, your domain name can be sold to anyone who wants it. There are many companies who want to buy up domain names that have been established for a long time as they have established traffic and are usually better placed in the search engines than are new domain names. If your domain name was originally registered by someone else (perhaps your original web developer), it is very possible that it is not registered in your name at all. Renewal notices are only sent to the owner of record and we often see situations where the original registrant has gone out of business and the domain name expires. When this happens, you can apply to buy the name yourself but there is no guarantee that you will be successful. This recently happened to one of our clients after their 10 year registration expired. Their original developer had registered the domain name himself and could not be located. Our client was finally able to recover the domain name but his website and email were offline for over a month and he had to outbid another company that wanted his domain name. There are two important lessons in all of this;
For more information on domain names, read our article on Finding and Buying Domain Names. While on the subject of domain names, we should warn you about a scam that takes advantage of how little you may know about your domain name and how little attention you pay to it. If you manage your domain name yourself, be wary of offers you receive in the mail or by email that appear to be reminders to renew your domain name. If they are not from your original domain name registrar, they are attempts to become the registrar of your domain name and charge you exorbitant rates for their services. If Caskie Web Solutions is managing your domain name(s), you can safely ignore these attempts to renew your domain name registration. We do this for you automatically. |
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