Whack SIte of the Week – June 21
United States Special Operations Command
http://www.socom.mil/SOCOMHome/Pages/default.aspx
These guys can barely build a website, and they’re the SOCOM we all hear bout? Whoa.
Whack Site of the Week – May 24
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Whack Site of the Week – April 26
Canadian Fire Alarm Association – http://cfaa.ca/
Where to begin on this one…
- Novel use of the animated gif RE: Flames on the landing page
- I’ve tried to count, at least five times, the number of font sizes used on the “home page” , and each time I come up with a different number
- Hold on wait, the whole site is 1 page…see #4
- Love the page title “frames setup page”, so retro.
- CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
- Apparently “What’s New” is also on fire.
- An awful use of overline on hover in the “menu” (Can that really be called a menu?) at the top.
To sum up…that site was probably way cool back when it was done in 1999 (It’s true! Check the copyright at the bottom!), but in 2010? Whack.
What’s In A Name
Having developed a variety of online properties over the years, I thought it was time to put my comments down on “paper” regarding how to choose a name. Specifically we’re talking about choosing a name for a business that is based primarily online, whether it be a web design company, or a web application.
Describe Your Business
Although this seems to be obvious, picking a name that describes your business, or at least your vertical, is often very tough to do. You have to balance your descriptor with a variety of other considerations, which we’ll talk more about below. I’ve had a few experiences with picking semantic names for online properties, with varying degrees of “description”.
RestaurantGuideToronto.com – Describes the business explicitly.
BigShanks.com – A playful approach to the business category (golf) but is still somewhat descriptive.
GridironSurvivor.com – A mix of the examples above; Playful but explicitly describing the property’s intention.
On another front, there are a strong contingent of people out there who will disagree vehemently with this whole concept, citing properties like Google and Yahoo! as examples. While I’m willing to agree that there are cases where you can throw semantics to the wind and go abstract, I’m also very aware that this route requires the support of a serious marketing team to successfully pull off.
Make it Memorable
There’s more to a name than just describing what you do. I think we can all agree that when we’re exposed to countless numbers of advertisements everyday, both online and offline, there are those that stand out and those that clearly do not.
Sometimes straightforward is great, if you’re a law firm or a taxi company, but if you’re an online property trying to market a product or service amidst a plethora of existing websites, and your goals is to attract new visitors, a memorable name goes a long way towards getting people to visit you.
Make It Easy To Spell
This is a big one for me. The very first online business I started back in 2001 had a name which, although “catchy”, ended up being a minor pain throughout the life of the business because of a common beginner’s mistake… don’t try and be witty by swapping/replacing sounds or letters!
MarketingSharks – Good
MarketingSharx- Bad
I can tell you from experience, you’ll get checks with the wrong name on it, and you’ll lose email from misspelling etc. “But the invoice/business card/pamphlet said MarketingSharx!” It doesn’t matter, just don’t do it.
Our current approach is to pick a name and ask a dozen people to spell it after having a brief conversation about the business objective. One misspelling and it’s back to the drawing board!
Get the .com & Don’t Take Shortcuts
This is potentially the most difficult part of picking any business name these days, getting the .com. Unless you’re a charity or a non-profit organization, you just have to get the .com of your business name. It’s true, most of them are gone, but the fact is, you can more often that not, buy them. Sure, it’s going to cost some money, but if you’re serious about your business there’s no reason not to buy your domain at a premium. If you were starting a brick and mortar would you take shortcuts on your signage? Probably not.
The second part of this is not taking shortcuts. As much as we love our friends over at Basecamp, they’ve created a trend which, in this writers opinion, trivializes the seriousness of a brand by adding “hq” to the domain to skirt the availability of the proper.com name.
Summing It Up
In summary, picking a name is not easy, that’s clear. However, I maintain that if you’re going to take your business seriously and try and make a real “run for it” in the online marketplace, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do what you can to get your brand just right.
This isn’t to say that you can’t successfully create a brand which goes against all of these tips – In fact, I’m absolutely certain you can do it. But for my money, I will always try and adhere to these tips in any online endeavor I undertake in the foreseeable future.
Whack Site of the Week – April 12
WTF? Nice flash intro. Are they trying to purposely induce some type of seizure? Or are they just trying to garner a general “Stab me in the eye for the love of god!” type of reaction? Epic Flash Fail.
Whack Site of the Week – Mar 15
Utah Ski Rentals – Vintage ugliness!
Whack Site of the Week – Mar 1
This time we go international to Zimbabwe’s government site.
Telltale sings of whack-ness are abound, including the animated gif of their flag and no horizontal space beside the image of…. their leader?
Also, you have to love it when menu items are set to #, a true developers pre-launch oversight. (Left menu – The Presidium & The Premier)
Developing in the Cloud
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “The Cloud” and how it’s going to fundamentally change operating systems and specifcally, the way we manage our information. With the anouncement of Google’s Chrome OS, this does seem to be a fair assumption, although the time to reach any significant saturation point is, I would guess, at least 5 or 6 years away.
In any event, the growth of the cloud concept will give birth to a variety of incidental web applications and cool little projects, one of which I wanted to mention here.
Kodingen
Kodingen, www.kodingen.com, is web based development environment for LAMP developers. They’re in beta at the moment, but still, pretty sweet. In their own words:
Our aim in developing Kodingen is to remove all barriers that stand between you and those cool web applications you want to develop. As you know, even to get your simple “Hello World” running, you need to download and install a lot of programs, deal with PHP, Apache installations, buy a code editor, set up an FTP server and go through lots of other mind-numbing tasks.
No more. We are very excited to give you Kodingen, a tool where you can connect your FTP’s, create databases, have your SVN and bugtracking tools -the minute you create your account. Very soon you will also be able to collaborate with your team instantly without exchanging any passwords.
Whack Site of the Week – Feb 15
NASA - http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-108/flash/sts108.swf
Yeah, that NASA.
A stunning example of the complete and total misuse of Flash.
