Barry Hand

Ten most expensive domains from 2009

02.08.10 Posted in Websites by Barry

Getting the right domain name is hugely important for web based businesses. Sedo reports on the top 10 expensive domains purchased last year. What’s interesting is that it includes four travel related domains.

The ten most expensive global domain sales in 2009:

Fly.com – £1,152,173.24
Russia.com – £904,319.74
Call.com – £678,749.65
Server.com – £478,143.83
America.com – £474,977.28
Files.com – £449,845.74 [updated]
Christian.com – £366,917.29
Top.com – £327,916.88
Talk.com – £303,994.08
Brazil.com – £302,489.98

Half that list are still just holding pages, while others have an obvious lack of content and general poor design. Take Christian.com for example which is running a very average WordPress theme, and Files.com – Is it worth half a million? (nope, because I got the domain wrong, it’s FILES.COM

The priciest domain, Fly.com was bought by Meta-search giant TravelZoo who most surely deem it worth the purchase.

Tips for better ideas

01.27.10 Posted in Advertising by Barry

Canadian agency Rethink fund a scholarship for future designers, and use the following video to promote it. Which gives advice on the creative process which is really inspiring.

better than…

The internet in numbers (2009)

01.25.10 Posted in Websites by Barry

Pingdom have put together the highlights of 2009, some pretty fascinating numbers here.

Internet users

1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social Media

126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
350 million – People on Facebook.
50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Websites

234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
47 million – Added websites in 2009.

More here….

Making your blog iphone friendly

01.24.10 Posted in Usability, Web Design, Websites by Barry

Browsing websites on an iphone can be a little frustrating and any website which has a mobile iphone specific skin adds a higher level of stickyness.

So how do you know if you know how many users are accessing your website with an iphone?, Luckily most analytic packages will let you drill down and see the operating system and browser type.

From Google Analytics, its Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Browsers and OS.

A very small percentage are accessing using the Safari/iPhone combo, but Wii, PS3 & ipod touch visitors make up roughly 10%, so enough to warrant some configuration.

Accessing my site with an iphone looks like this, which doesn’t render too well as the width is too much and doesn’t zoom correctly.

Adding the WPtouch plugin, sets a mobile friendly theme for iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm, with support for the following user-agents: android, aspen, blackberry9500, blackberry9530, cupcake, dream, incognito, iphone, ipod, opera mini, webmate, webos.

Once installed it looks like this to mobile visitors.

Very easy to install and configure, but makes a massive difference – definitely one of the must have additions for wordpress users.

(I’ve used a mac app called Iphoney to test)

Barry Hand

Ten most expensive domains from 2009

The ten most expensive global domain sales in 2009:

Tips for better ideas