Looking professional on the Web - is it the domain name, or the design?
A couple of weeks ago, Carol Tice at makealivingwriting.com wrote a great post about leveraging one's blog into a paying writing gig. One piece of advice caught my eye:
Clean design also means not having .blogger or .wordpress or something in your URL. Pay the tiny fee and get hosting — it really makes you look a lot more pro.
I wondered if this applied to Typepad blogs as well - Carol seems to feel that a blog whose domain ends in typepad.com is not much better than one ending in blogspot.com (Blogger) or wordpress.com.
I'm still not convinced.
I think that "the difference that makes a difference" is the design, rather than the domain name. Carol Tice is right that blogspot.com and wordpress.com look unprofessional - but I think it's because the stock blog themes available on these free blogging hosts are recognizable as stock themes. Typepad's Unlimited and Premium blog hosting levels allow full customization.
Mind you, if you're going to pay $15 per month to host a single blog, you might as well pay for "real" Web hosting, with your own domain and fully-customized installation of Wordpress. If you followed my recent Design Inspiration Countdown series, you know that a site that uses Wordpress doesn't have to look like just another Wordpress site. But if you use the default Wordpress theme, I don't think your own domain will make you look much more professional.
Of course, looking at this blog's theme, you would probably say that I need to take my own advice!
Can your audience reach your blog? Check your domain name!
Last month (June 2011), I reached a personal Internet milestone. It was ten years ago when I first registered my personal domain name, spurlock.cc.
Sadly, however, not everyone is supportive of my achievement. In particular, the Web filtering at my day job has started blocking my domain, including both my blog and my webmail.
Websense offers a tool that you can use to scan your blog's URL (or any other site's Web address) for security threats. When I scan spurlock.cc, Websense's tool advises me that my domain may contain "Potentially Damanging Content...based on the URL of web page."
I suspect that the problem is the .cc Top-Level Domain (TLD) suffix. It's the TLD of the Cocos Islands, a South Seas territory of Australia. But Websense thinks it's "Potentially Damaging" - perhaps because other .cc domains have hosted actual malicious content
I'm not going to fight the filtering at work. I can't pretend I have a compelling business reason to read my own blog from my desk. But the takeaway here is - check your domain name! If Websense doesn't like it, your audience may not be able to reach it - and Websense is used by many businesses and government organizations, including public libraries.
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