Top-level domain names:

From January 2013, companies will be able to apply for a customised internet name. For example we could apply for .morellodigital, Virgin for .virgin etc. This frees companies up from the current restrictions of .com and .net, among others.

In terms of creating these “top-level domain names” costs are expected to be a whopping $500,000, including a $185,000 application fee.

Nor is this going to be confined to companies. Cities (London – .london or New York .nyc) can take advantage of this new opportunity as well.

Costs are a concern:

Although the costs for small businesses clearly will not be as high, this does constitute as an extra cost. And potentially businesses will be left with no choice but to buy the domain relevant to them. Purchasing and owning a new top-level domain name will be much cheaper than a protracted legal battle with a cybersquatter.

Cybersquatters excited by the potential:

Cybersquatters are the term coined for those people that buy up domain names speculatively in the hope that they can resell to those that actually need at a profit. It is surprising that this practice is allowed to go on so freely, given that it effectively holds businesses to ransom. These opportunists can name their price when it comes to selling the domains. Sky for example, would not be able to operate as effectively with anything other than Sky.com as their domain. They could but any other term is not as relevant. So if you owned the domain 15 yrs ago, you could name your price!

Going to the highest bidder:

Another potential flaw in this new opportunity is that it has been decided that ownership of popular names will be decided by auction. So not only will the costs potentially be sky-high, but somewhat farcically, you may be stripped of the opportunity to own the domain name most relevant to your business.

So now, any LinkedIn user can follow a company on the network, and will receive real-time alerts from the profile in their news and activity stream. It’s very similar in theory to the act of “following” someone on Twitter of becoming a fan of someone on Facebook.

With over 45 million registered users, it is no surprise to us that LinkedIn is pushing more social features.

We think there are potential risks here for the online reputation of companies. They need to ensure their pages are updated with relevant, and fresh information all the time. There will need to be procedures in place in terms of who can update the pages, and what they can say.

What do you think?Is this something that could potentially benefit your business? To enable potential job applicants to keep an eye on the jobs coming up within your company in the near future is one use for this…can you think of any more?

David Harrison, MD, said “It is always unfortunate when a company has to follow this course of action but our intention is to create as seamless a transfer as possible for clients of Waypoint. As a company we pride ourselves on our customer service and trust we will be able to build long term mutually beneficial relationships with our new clients. We will be contacting all the new clients over the next couple of days with the further intention of moving sites to our own servers as fast as possible. Any Waypoint clients we have not yet spoken to who have any questions should not hesitate to contact us on 01743 244204, where we are available to assist.”

The addition of Waypoint’s clients brings the total number of sites under our control to well in excess of 200. We are able to build and market a broad range of sites from basic content managed sites through to fully bespoke builds that integrate with your in house systems. If you would like to talk to us about developing your own site please do not hesitate to contact us.

Morello Digital are pleased to announce that we are currently working on the following projects:

The Drury, a high quality and rather large self catering house in Oban, have asked us to design and develop their new website.

Scotland’s Hotels of Distinction have also asked us to revamp the current site. The designs are almost fully approved and we should start building the new site next week.

One of our favourite clients, Burgoynes of Lyonshall, have also asked us to re develop their sites, to include more interaction with social media channels. This is in progress and should be ready soon.

The Station In at Marshbrook have received planning permission on their new project, a fantastic mountain biking centre and Wigwam accommodation centre. The blog should be up and running next week and the full site will follow before the year end.

Pimhill Farm is our first collaboration with Carl Jones Design. We have built the current static site and the new content managed version will be live for the weekend.

Woods of Shropshire have asked us to add additional functionality to their very successful site – take a look if you need some good ideas for Xmas presents or need a new shirt!

We are further working on a new travel site based on the Facebook model – a really exciting project that we will keep you up to date on over the next couple of months ..

Close to completion also are two larger projects for Culture Colony, an arts based site for all of Wales, and another of our favourite clients LHH Scotland where we have developed a fully integrated bespoke accommodation and property management system.

Both agencies produce high quality work in the areas of graphic design, branding and corporate communications and we are proud to be associated with these companies. We look forward to developing the relationships over the coming months and years.

If you are a design, marketing or PR agency who feels you could benefit from a reliable and effective development partner, please do not hesitate to get in touch – we use open source platforms including WordPress, Drupal and Magento in addition to any bespoke system development that is required such as integration with in house platforms.

I thought I should write up a little post about how well the brewery are doing. I played golf with John last Friday and he tells me that they are even getting business from Twitter now – which of course I will claim full credit for putting him onto! The Shropshire Star wrote a good article on his tweets last week – click here to read what they said.

In my opinion a brewery, like any other business, needs to have excellent customer service. Having a number of John’s clients as clients myself I know that they are really good, but it is the fact that certain things others fall down on are considered “de rigeur” that sets them apart – if I was running a pub I would want to know that my beer would arrive on time – apparently this is not a given in the licenced trade, but it is with The Three Tuns Brewery who have never been late with a delivery since John and Bill took it over.

They are really busy and approaching capacity again – John even suggested there might be a waiting list soon! My advice therefore is get in touch with them sooner rather than later – my personal recommendations would be the XXX and Clerics Cure beers – excellent, if a tad too moreish!

I’m sure John would also agree that their website, designed and built by Morello Digital of course, has not done them any harm either!

I don’t know about you, but there is so much information out there at present that it almost becomes overwhelming, so this course should add a degree of structure – at least I hope so as it is a three year commitment on a part time basis.

I fully expect it to directly translate into helping our clients take advantage of all that Digital Marketing can offer.

At Morello Digital we recognise this and that is why we have always hosted our client sites on a quality dedicated server. For those of you who wonder why hosting costs can vary so much it is more than likely that you are not comparing like with like. When we say a “dedicated” server we mean exactly that – our server only has our sites on it. This means that you are not potentially sharing your site with some dodgy porn site that could end up getting your own site blacklisted by Google through no fault of your own!

As a company, Morello Digital uses Rackspace to look after our server. They are by no means the cheapest, but as with most things in life you get what you pay for. A server is just like any other computer – it will occasionally develop some sort of glitch – what one needs is a company that fixes those glitches quickly – that is why we use Rackspace and also recommend them to those clients who need their own server too.

After a couple of years happily living in one box, we are going to be moving our sites to a new server over the next few weeks. For those of a technical nature, this is the spec of the new machine:

Dell 2970
OS : Red Hat 5 (64 bit)
PLESK 8 (unlimited domains with Spam Assassin and Dr Web)
Processor: Single Quad Core AMD Opteron 2347 processor
RAM: 4 GB RAM
Hard drive: 4 x 146 GB SAS Hard drives
RAID: – Hardware RAID 5
Hot swappable drives
Dual power supplies, Nics, Fans
Fanatical support,
Rackwatch Platinum
Managed Backup Agent + MySQL Agent

It is rather a good machine and has all the usual security, firewalls and back up you would expect. We look forward to improving our client’s hosting environment over the next few weeks.

If you are unhappy with your current hosts, please give us a call and we will be more than happy to give you a quote on our managed hosting services.

At present the site is still in test mode, but feel free to try it out and your comments will be much appreciated.
http://www.culturecolony.newsitetesting.co.uk/. The site includes some pretty clever video streaming so if you are looking for something similar please don’t hesitate to get in touch.