I love technology (.org)

Seth Godin discusses the suggestion that you should drop the “(dot)com” from your marketing material.

The suggestion goes that, in the same manner that we have dropped the “www(dot)” when we say or write a website address, we could drop the end of the address as well.

Seth disagrees with the suggestion, using the good argument that the (dot)com has become a way to say “this is my website address”.

However, the most obvious argument for not dropping the “(dot)com” when telling people your website address is that… many website addresses do not end with ”com”! 

My own website is “.org”, which is a pretty common website extension, as is “.net”, not to mention all the non-american websites with local site extensions, such as “.co.uk”, “.fr” and many others.

My take is this: if you don’t want to appear like an uneducated and domeering american website owner, don’t drop the “.com” when marketing your website address! Ackowledge that the rest of the world exists and you might get more readers/visitors from the World Wide Web

 Additional resources:

 Seth Godin’s “drop the dot?” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/drop-the-dot.html

While setting up this blog, i thought it would be interesting to study which designs were the most popular amongst the Top 20 Technorati blogs.

First, i studied the layouts in terms of sidebar & content locations on the page. The top 20 Technorati blogs all fitted within one of the four following categories:

• sidebar on the left, content in the middle, sidebar on the right
• sidebar on the left, content
• content, sidebar on the right
• content, first sidebar on the right, second sidebar on the far right

Check out the graph below for an overview of the Top technorati blog layouts:

While there are two clear favourites in terms of layouts, it is interesting to note that both have the content on the left.

I then looked at the colour scheme used on the page. You can find the analysis on the graph below:

There is no clear favourite colour; however, i found that most technology oriented blogs favoured a blue colour, while gossip and celebrity blogs favoured red or pink (counted as “others”).

What conclusion can you draw from this? Use a layout with the content on the left side of the page, and use the colour scheme you like

Additional resources:

“10 remarkables (and free) Wordpress themes” http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/19/10-remarkable-and-free-wordpress-themes/

“blog design for beginners” http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/17/blog-design-for-beginners/