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Category: Best Practices

Protect Your Domain Name in Seven Easy Steps

Published August 16, 2006

I’ve seen far too many friends and colleagues accidentally lose their Website domain names by forgetting to renew them in a timely manner. This can have catastrophic results, but it doesn’t have to happen to you. In fact, it can be easily avoided by following my list of seven simple steps.

Why not take a few minutes right NOW to reduce the likelihood of losing your domain name?

Seven Easy Steps to Protecting Your Domain Name

Step 1: Identify who your domain name registrar is.
If you are not sure who your registrar is, use a WHOIS directory like Allwhois to determine the name of your registrar (the company you registered the domain name with).

Step 2: Determine your registrar’s contact information.
Using the WHOIS record information, make note of the email and phone coordinates for the registrar (sometimes listed under "Technical Contact") and file this information in a safe place. And the registrar has to have a Website, so make sure you bookmark it.

Step 3: Confirm your domain name expiry date.
Also using the WHOIS record, check to see what "Renewal" date is listed. This is your expiry date and you MUST renew your domain name before then.

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How Digg.com Gets A Massage

Published August 11, 2006

I’ve got a bit of a fondness of the custom “we’ll be right back” messages some sites post when they are temporarily down for maintenance.
Last year I pointed out “Bloglines’ Plumber”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/06/26/i-love-the-bloglines-plumber and this spring I pointed out super-apologetic “Backpack Error Messages”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/05/18/helpful-error-pages. Flickr’s downtime message is so popular it’s become a “meme”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/07/31/the-meme-epidemic-a-case-study onto itself (do a Google search on “is having a massage”:http://www.google.com/search?q=+%22is+having+a+massage%22 if you’re not hip to the jive).

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30 Quick Wins For Any Site That Sells

Published June 18, 2006

Last week I presented at “Visa’s Big Thinking Conference”:http://www.visa.ca/bigthinking/ (Thanks to “Rick Spence”:http://canentrepreneur.blogspot.com/ for the opportunity). My presentation was called “30 Quick Wins for Any Site That Sells”.
One of my basic premises is that most every site should “sell” – in the sense that it should be built to help people take an action – and because of that the presentation is fairly different from the typical “a bunch of stuff to think about for your e-commerce site”.
In the spirit of sharing I’ve decided to post all 100 slides along with my speaker’s notes here at One Degree for the benefit of those who were unable to attend.
You can download 30 Quick Wins For Any Site That Sells as a 100 page, 7MB PDF file here.

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