Sometimes, when I am taking a break from staring blankly out of my window, I look about the office and see what other people are up to. Sadly, it is usually work, but occasionally it is quite interesting stuff.
For example, some of my colleagues have been trying to come up with a domain name for a spin-off from the IT Week site. Most of the discussions have been on what to call it, and, predictably, all my suggestions have gone down as badly as the name I suggested my friends give their baby boy. For some reason, they didn’t think Lupin befitted a child who is likely to spend his formative years in Peckham.
But what’s in a name anyway? Whenever I want to find something on the internet these days, I just type what I want into the handy drop-down Google toolbar search box that comes as part of the Firefox browser that I use. Some sites, like a few of the more niche pages I look at, take a bit of creative googling: monkeys + news + “man on top of tower in short shorts” is a good example. Drilling down in this way makes it a lot easier to find what I am looking for and beats pure guesswork, such as typing “randommonkeynews.com” into the address bar of my browser.
Once upon a time, I would have typed “weather” “holiday” “football” or “shopping” with either a .com or .co.uk suffix. This had varying degrees of success – usually down the wrong end of the sliding scale of success. Please kids, never blindly search for the Whitehouse page, it will end in tears.
Nowadays, when my Luddite friends start typing general words into their address bar, I snatch the mouse from them and suggest that they just Google it. Once they finish howling, this usually works – at least in terms of finding what we are looking for on the interweb.
When I started at IT Week we all thought that the sites that would come to rule the web would be the ones that had domain names that were easy to guess. But this hasn’t happened. Net browsing, sadly, is not so straightforward.
I attended the Technology for Marketing show at Olympia for a couple of manic hours early last week and found out that while I know nothing about web marketing, web presence boosting and paying or bidding on clicks, I do know that it is bloody complicated.
It seems that the role of the web manager is blurring with that of the marketing people as hidden content, and actual content, becomes more important to establishing a successful web site than what name it has.
Is that clear to you? Nah, me neither. Perhaps I’d better spend less time staring out of my window.
