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The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names

By Christopher Johnson, May 2nd, 2009 in How-To | 91 Comments

Naming is linguistic design, and a good domain name is an important part of the overall design of a website. A name plays a prominent role when people discover, remember, think about, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time. Coming up with a good domain name requires a combination of strategy, imagination and good linguistic design practice.

You'll find some basic pieces of advice all over the Web, and it’s worth mentioning those right away. Ideally, your domain name should be: short, catchy and memorable, easy to pronounce, easy to spell, not too similar to competing domain names, not a violation of someone else’s trademark.

These are all good rules of thumb. But they lack specifics. These are really criteria to use to evaluate ideas for names after you’ve thought of them. To come up with a name in the first place, you need to know what type of name is best for you. And before you can answer that question, you have to answer two others: one about your resources, and the other about your Web strategy.

You may be interested in the following related post:
- Domain Names: Tools, Articles and Resources
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Best Practices For Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery

By Smashing Editorial, October 16th, 2007 in How-To | 66 Comments

Have your e-mails already been flagged as spam, although you've sent a seemingly legitimate proposal to your client? Have you ever wondered why the efficiency of your newsletter campaigns suddenly dropped down? In both cases you deal with a problem which is harder to get done with than you think it is: bulletproof e-mail delivery.
The main problem with undelivered mails is that both sides — sender and recipient — don't really know what happened. Was the e-mail sent? Is the task done? Was the e-mail delivered? Most recipients will never know that an e-mail flagged as spam was sent to them — they just don't receive the e-mail. And most senders will never know that an e-mail flagged as spam wasn't delivered — they just don't get a response.

This article suggests over 20 bulletproof techniques, best practices and related services you can use to ensure best e-mail and newsletter delivery rates.

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Web Domains: Tools To Use, Articles To Read

By Smashing Editorial, June 28th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 60 Comments

A thought-out domain name can save you a lot of time and bring you a lot of traffic. Search engines love topic-related domain names and they seem to be an important aspect which is being used to evaluate web-pages. Besides, if you have a popular web-site with enviable reputation, you might be willing to make sure that your visitors don't get to some surprising web-sites mistyping your site's URL. An overview of related resources is therefore both useful, handy and time-saving. Apart from that: apparently, domain names handling can also be a successful business, you just need to know what trends are coming and which terms will be important in the future. Let's take a look at essential, hand-picked domain-related tools, articles and resources we've found in the Web during our research.
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Preventing Spam: Bulletproof Solutions

By Smashing Editorial, December 14th, 2006 in How-To | 38 Comments

Spam is probably one of the most difficult problems we have to deal with. E-Mail-filters, such as those used in GMail, provide accurate results, but not every company is willing to use extern services for its private mails. The problem occurs when web-developers have to display e-mail-addresses on a web-page. How can you make sure that not a single spam mail will find its path to the inbox of your client? Or, speaking in more concrete terms, the question is, how should you display e-mails on a web-page in order to minimize spam attacks? Let's take a look at some modern and bulletproof solutions and techniques which will help you to prevent spam in your mailbox or the mailbox used by your clients.
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Complete List of Best SEO-Tools

By Smashing Editorial, September 22nd, 2006 in Developer's Toolbox | 58 Comments

What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? We deliver answers. Here is the list of the most useful SEO-tools you might be willing to use, [...]
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