Book your domain RIGHT NOW

How soon should you book your domain name?

It’s 7 AM, and sitting on the pot, you have a brilliant idea for a marketing campaign (this being the most creatively productive activity of the day) that will wow the nation. You rush to office, get the idea on paper, take your boss’ approval, detail it, and announce it to the team.
It’s already too late.

What you should have done was book the URL the minute the boss okayed it. Maybe even before, if you really believed in it. It’s not a job for the interactive agency, nor for the IT department, nor your net-savvy exec or intern, nor any department assigned this responsibility, if it exists.

You need to log onto net4.in or it’s contempories, find availability and reserve the name. It’s free for 15 days, too, while you can make the payment (if via check / draft / etc).

Why am I saying this? You have heard of Walk When You Talk, right?
Go to www.walkwhenyoutalk.com
Whoops! That seems to have been hijacked by the Jai Ho Cricket Club. What an idea, sirji!

The real Walk When You Talk campaign microsite is on a .co.in id… a classic case of somebody realizing that the domain needs to be booked after too many people had got to know and the news leaked.And somebody smart leapt in to take advantage.

Better luck next time!

Did you know you have a crappy site?

Yeah, we’ve seen a dozen and more of these analyzers… how effective or useful are they? Thought I’ll take a look.

Website Grader Logo

Website Grader: Lets you compare competition, but needs your email id. Gives a decent, easy-to-understand grade… but that grade is based only as per the 1 million websites submitted so far. Excellent breakup of elements, but best of all, it’s in English, not a table of scores. It actually points out what’s wrong, why, and what you can do about it. Gives an option for analyzing interior pages.
It also breaks the analysis very logically – on-site, off-site SEO, the blogosphere, social media utilization, conversion – ability, competitive intelligence, etc. Pretty good for analyzing even blogs.
Score: 10 on 10

Xinu logo

Xinu:  Nice. I liked this at first glance. Huge wealth of info available.
Unfortunately, it’s only available as a glance – you will get the scores but figure out what they mean on your own. There isn’t any in-depth detailing, getting into the meaning and action points of each score; so while you get a good structure, the fleshing out means a lot f time spent on research and formulating your own way ahead.
Score: 6 on 10

Site Analyzer from GoingUp

GoingUp!’s Site Analyzer: Not that great – but useful from a basic SEO perspective, especially if this is your first site. Good understanding of backlinks.
The social media analysis, rankings, pages – not very comprehensive. All-in-all, a bit too brief; it’s like a decent trailer rather than the movie itself.
Score: 5 on 10

Cubestat Website value calculator

Cubestat: Very interestingly, Cubestat gives you a $ value for your site; take this as entertainment value only, since I don’t know how the algorithm works. (My travel blog, for instance, is worth $164.25 = Rs. 7,826.64; just about enough to sponsor ONE last trip, and not a very good one at that.)
Other stats are fairly basic, and not very useful. An interesting feature is a list of ‘sites of similar worth’, which would have been fun had it been longer. It’s more mystifying than illuminating at this stage.
Score: 4 on 10 (and the $$ value feature was worth 2 of this 4)

 And most importantly, do all site analyzers agree with each other?

Not completely. DMOZ listings, RSS detection and pageranks are the most contentious issues; but overall, the final picture you get is fairly accurate. Even blogs can checked, but the results start looking a bit weird here; a wordpress blog is analyzed according to the wordpress domain, and blogger vacillates between the blog and blogger.com info.

This isn’t a comprehensive post or a detailed review; I need to spend more time checking these (and more) out. Any suggestions for other, similar sites or tools?