We web designers are shaking our heads tonight in bewilderment at ICANN’s decision, confirmed today, to completely change the way that top level domains are created and distributed.

You can read the story here

Internet overhaul wins approval

and a great FAQ of what this will mean for businesses:

Q&A: What do the new internet domains mean for me?.

From where I sit, I will eventually have to advise clients to raise their budgets for domain name registration from under £100 to possibly £1,000 or more.  That’s fine if you are a big business with a big budget, but I work with sole traders, startups, and hard-working charities.  This is not fair to them.

We will have to watch regular vocabulary words become, socially and legally, the private property of the highest bidder.  The hypothetical domain .grocery, for example.  Will your local corner shop or greengrocer have the £100,000 and the technical infrastructure to win registration rights for .grocery, or a few hundred quid to buy a .grocery domain?  Of course not, but the big boys - hmm, who could I be thinking of - have that money as pocket change.  Get ready for Tesco Domains!  And then get ready to watch your corner shop take out a loan in order to pay Tesco for a .grocer domain.  Every little ‘elps.

ICANN has not addressed the criteria they will use to screen TLD bidders for objectionable content.  I can very easily put together a business plan for the “.sucks” domain, envisioning how I will make gazillions of dollars allowing people to buy a .sucks domain from me.  Who is then responsible for the fallout from millions of hate sites propagating all over the web?  Does ICANN then smile and say “we’re not responsible for what people choose to put on a .sucks site?”  How about if I translate “.sucks” into seventy five languages, and apply to administer every one of them?  Where will ICANN draw the line on which TLDs are acceptable and which are not, from which cultural, moral, or free speech viewpoint, and does an extra suitcase of cash help to influence their decision?

Going back to my first point, do I need to start advising clients to purchase a .sucks domain along with their .com, .co.uk. .net, and all the other domains, to protect them from .sucks domain privateers, disgruntled ex-employees, or cutthroat competitors?  And is that “.sucks” in English or “.sucks” in the thirty different languages where “.sucks” sites with their company name have sprung up?  Does domain registration become a constant, ghastly expensive process, with businesses having to spend thousands of pounds every year to protect their own brands from the imaginations of time-wasters, spammers, and bored Japanese teenagers?

And the race is on to see which egotistical twat is the first to start using his own name as his domain.  “Hi, I’m Joe Socks.  That’s joe dot socks at joesocks dot joe socks.  Yes, I do live in Kilmacolm, how did you know?”

The only positive change I see is that domains will be opened up to non-Roman alphabets such as Arabic, Russian, Chinese, etc.  Quite fair to the four billion people who have been waiting for it.

But as for the rest of today’s worrying developments, perhaps we can take heart by looking at how successful the last tranche of extended domains have been since their release in 2000.  You know the ones: .aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .tel, .travel., and .pro.  When was the last time you used a site with one of those domains, and for designers, when was the last time you created one?  ICANN made their decision today despite eight years of market evidence that neither web users nor web site owners are interested in unlimited domains.

If the brave new frontier does become the norm, it’s going to take a good number of years to be accepted in the public’s mind.  Until then, custom domains will be a vanity exercise for big money and big egos.  It’s the little guys who will suffer for it.  I do not like the notion of a group of elites making an earth-shaking announcement - from sumptuous meeting facilities in Paris, naturally - without dealing with the difficult, practical questions that business owners are now asking as a result of today’s decisions.

A few weeks ago my antivirus program, AVG, was automatically updated to version 8.0 - an improved version which integrated antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, email scanning, web screening, and hoovering the furniture all in one piece of software.  Great, I thought.

As soon as the new software went active, my computer got slower.  And slower.  And slower.  My internet connection went from crap British broadband speed to dialup speed.  At some point I started to question why I was sticking with a program which had clearly taken a turn for the worse.  Someone suggested disabling the LinkScanner and Web Shield portions of the utility, so I went in and discovered that I had already done that - and I was that slow without those two!

I finally gave up today when I was trying to enter tasks into my project management utility, BT Workspace, and the Vista-style windows were scrolling in slow motion, while my other programs were taking up to ten seconds to appear when clicking through them.  This was just getting ridiculous.

I installed Avira antivirus and uninstalled AVG.  As soon as I restarted the computer, bang.  It was like I had a brand new machine.  I actually sat staring at my desktop out of habit of waiting for the four and a half minutes it took to start up with AVG.  As my computer sat staring at me waiting for me to get back to work.

Hey, AVG, we had a good few years together, but I’ve met someone else who doesn’t drag me down.

While cleaning up my bookmarks, I rediscovered Colourlovers, officially a “colour and design community for visual inspiration”, and possibly the closest thing to whiling away a day in the V&A with a blank notebook and an open mind.

I will definitely remain a lurker there - I’m not worthy!

Look for a background I discovered there to make its debut in the next two weeks.

I’ve written a book.

This is for my fellow Wise-Women:

http://www.onehorseshy.com/highbrow/

Me, I’m going for the owls…

Today I lost some critically productive hours to my VPS’s control panel (Plesk) being down.  Although all my sites and emails were operative, the control panel which gives me master access to the server was down, naturally on the one day I had to set up a new client’s web hosting and database.

The error message told me I was using an invalid security certificate which, curiously enough, was only valid for an IP address completely different than my VPS’s address.  I phoned Webfusion several times to try to speak to tech support, and kept getting a recorded message advising me that there were problems with Plesk and VPS today, so I chalked it up to that.  The message said to keep an eye on Webfusion’s status page, which has absolutely nothing about this problem.

After 12 hours of this I decided to bite the bullet and wait on hold (for 25 minutes) with Webfusion tech support.  What then followed was a 20 minute conversation that made me very glad that I had a glass of wine at hand.  The tech support:

1) Denied that there was any problem with LINUX Plesk and VPS - only Windows Plesk and VPS!

2) Denied that the fact that my certificate was for a different IP address was a potential security issue

3) Told me that the problem must be with my ISP suddenly deciding to block my own security certificate after all these months

4) Denied that he could do anything to help

5) Told me that as there was no problem from where he was sitting, he was not even going to log anything in Webfusion’s systems as a potential security issue or technical problem.

6) Actually said “I don’t know” more times than I cared to count.

Wanker.

So that’s a day lost, the relationship with my new client dented, and my trust in my VPS provider damaged.  Now to spend Friday picking up the pieces.  But first, a top-up to my rapidly emptied glass.

Web hosts are like men!  Sooner or later even the good ones go off and do something completely idiotic.  Says me, the Carrie Bradshaw of server tweaking.

I love this excerpt from Lois Frankel’s monthly coaching newsletter:

Recently, an affinity group from a large electronics firm called and asked me to make a presentation – but they had no budget. My recommendation to them was to get a budget so that their members didn’t feel like second class citizens.

Girlfriend practices what she preaches! In her life-transforming book, “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office”, she talks about how too many women in business apologise for wanting to spend money on their own professional development. They choose to regard themselves as charity cases and objects of sympathy, where male colleagues would find development money in the budget and spent it to the penny.

Hence a group of otherwise intelligent corporate women think they can guilt-trip a bestselling author into speaking to them, free of charge, about how to grow thicker skins. Clearly they’ve missed the point entirely, and none of them have actually read her book!  In business and in life, no one will respect you if you don’t respect yourself. And that means quitting the charity case act and regarding yourself as the professional that you are.

I spent some time today playing with Wordle, a clever web site which creates word pictures, or “clouds”, from your text. I played around with text from various clients’ web sites with some impressive results. Here is the cloud created from the text on the “about the book” page of Flip Outside the Box. Click to see it full size.

Anyone (including the author, I hope) would be proud to frame that in front of their desk for inspiration.

As I tried various paragraphs from different web sites and noticed that some clouds generated dull pictures whose words were mostly the same size, I realised that Wordle is a great way to literally “see the bigger picture” in your copywritten text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in your text, and filler words and definite articles are automatically stripped out. You are then left with a map of your own copy, colour-coded and ranked by size. The flaws in your copy become immediately obvious in ways you never saw when it was just text on a page.

Having seen my own copy issues in full colour, I’m not ready to frame my personal Wordle yet. But after some thoughtful wordsmithing, I will be.

A special hello to everyone finding this blog via Maria Langer’s Blog Tour tutorial video on Lynda.com.  If you have any questions about the blogging setup or process, just ask.

New site launched this week:

Flip Outside the Box

A very simple site for gymnastics coach Laurie Gallus to promote her new book, which is an innovative guide for gymnasts and coaches. With a title like “Flip Outside the Box”, I couldn’t exactly make a boxy site, now could I?

It was an especially enjoyable site to make since I worked on it with Laurie’s son Justin, whom I’ve known since we were both 14 years old-ish and whom I love to bits.

And for his benefit, here is the site’s CSS as mapped out with the CSS Poster utility on HTML-Kit.