TLD

• TLD is the extension of a domain name such as com, net, biz, or org.
• .Com based domain name is preferred compare to others.

Keyword in the domain name

• Domain that contains valuable keyword is really good. However most of good domain names are grab already.
• You can use estibot.com to check the estimated value of a domain name and see whether the domain is still available.

Length of the domain names

• Basically, short domain names prices higher than longer one
• The logic is short domain name is easier to remember than the long one.

Pronounceable

Domain name that can be pronounce is valuable than domain name that is hard to be pronounce.

Those is a few tips that you need to remember in choosing a good domain name so that if you do not want to blogging anymore, you can sell the domain name for a price.

• You can buy domain name separately with hosting provider and this will make it easier for you to sell your domain name later.
• You can buy and sell domain names trough auction at Sedo.com or Dnscoop.com .

Lastly, make sure that the domain name you are going to bought is not banned by Google or your domain will not be indexed by Google. You can check for blacklist domain at:

• http://www.all4seo.net/banned_checker.php
• http://www.dnxpert.com/google-banned-checker/

Sometimes you may wonder whether a website is custom made or use CMS. And perhaps you are eager to know which type of CMS that the website is using.

If you have knowledge about a CMS, then you can distinguished them by viewing the source code. For some famous CMS such as WordPress and Joomla, you can easily distinguish the type of CMS that is being used by accessing their admin login page. WordPress admin page is domain.com/wp-admin.php while Joomla is domain.com/administrator. The admin page address can actually be moved to keep it away from hacker but not many do that.

Other alternative is to use Wappalyzer,  add-on that is available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browser. For those that use Opera browser, you need to switch browser for a while. This add-on automatically check what type of technology that a website is using. Whether the CMS, or other scripts.

Wappalyzer not only detects CMS but also e-commerce systems, message boards, JavaScript frameworks, hosting panels, analytics tools and more. Wappalyzer is not hard to use. You just need to install the add-on. After that Wapalyzer automatically give you information about every site that you visit. An icon will appear at your status or address bar (depend on your setting) telling you about the CMS type and lot of other information.

You can go to the Wappalyzer option setting and check which information that you want to obtain from a website.

Once you detect what type of CMS that a website is using, then you can easily achieved the same results (in term of appearance and functionality) by using the same CMS as long as the plugin in the website is not custom built.

I hope you are aware that this tips is about how to move a wordpress blog from old domain to a new domain and not about:

• How to redirect blog address from www or non-www or vice versa
• How to change blog address from www or non-www or vice versa
• How to move from Blogspot to a new host
• How to transfer a website to a new host

Step 1: Point the new domain to your host a few days before migration

This step if for those that want to move their site to a new domain. If you only want to move the old domain to a subdomain, you can avoid this step. Sometimes it need more than a day for a domain name to fully propagate from your registrar to your host, that’s why you need to make sure you the domain is already pointed before you can perform the next step.

To check whether the new domain has been propagated or not, you can ping the domain name using the Windows command prompt. If the return IP is the same as your old domain name, that means the domain has been propagated.

Step 2: Make your blog private

Moving wordpress blog to a new domain is easy. The difficult thing is to ensure your ranking in the search engine ranking position (SERP). Once you change your blog to the new domain, the results that appear in search engine will not point to the new domain. It is still pointing to the old domain. This will cause duplicate issue. This is very dangerous as major search engine hate duplicate contents. Your blog that is move to the new domain might be marked by them as a spam blog.

That’s why it is important to use 301 redirection from the old domain to the new domain so that search engine know you have moved the blog to the new domain. The 301 redirection will be explained in Step 5. To ensure search engine from not visiting our site during domain name migration, change the setting of your blog privacy ( Dashboard >> Setting >> Privacy).

Alternative: Instead of blocking search engine, you can also shut down your entire website by using WordPress Maintenance Mode plugin.

Step 3: Change your WordPress blog information

Now is the time to move your wordpress blog to the new domain. Go to your WordPress Dashboard >> Settings >> General and change the ‘Wordpress address URL’ and ‘Site address URL’ values according to the new domain. After you save the changes, suddenly your browser will show that the page contain errors. Don’t worry as this is normal. As the domain name has been changed, you need to log in to your WP Admin through the new domain address.

Alternative: Besides changing the domain name information at the General Settings, you can go to your blog root folder and open the Wp-Config.php file. Find and change these values according to the value of the new domain.

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://www.example.com’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://www.example.com/blog’);

Don’t forget to save the file after editing is finished.

Step 4: Change the old links of the pictures and internal linking inside post

Now your blog address has been changed to the new one. How about the pictures and links embedded in the posts? Too bad since the pictures and links still use the old domain. You can actually change the links and images URL one by one. But I bet you want to waste your time doing that. Lucky, the Update URLs or Search Regex wordpress plugins solve this issue by automatically find any exact in URL in the database and change them to the new domain.

Alternative: If you have gut to play with database, you can achieve the same result by entering this query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://old-domain.com’, ‘http://new-domain.com’);
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://old-domain.com, ‘http://new-domain.com’);

Step 5: Use 301 permanent redirection from old domain to new domain

Now your blog has been fully setup to work with the new domain. The only thing remain is to alert search engine that every post has been move to new address. To do this, we need to use 301 redirection from the old domain to the new domain.

If you are aware, there is a redirection function in the hosting control panel. The redirection is only meant to redirect one page to another page or for www to non-www redirection. To redirect the whole posts in a wordpress blog to a new address, .htaccess tweaking is the only way to go.

The .htaccess file can be found in your wordpress blog root folder. Playing with .htaccess file is dangerous. But don’t afraid, just make sure if you have the backup of the .htaccess file so that you can revert if anything undesirable happen.

Last time when I need to do 301 redirection by tweaking .htaccess, lot of snippet that I tried did not work. The only code that works for me is here:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://newsite.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.oldsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://newsite.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

If you open the .htaccess file and find that the line ‘RewriteEngine’ On and ‘RewriteBase /’ is already there, you just need to put the RewriteCond and RewriteRule below the existing ‘RewriteBase /’ line.

After saving the .htaccess file, your oldsite.com/example should be redirected to newsite.com/example. The same redirection will happen to all of your posts. If you are not redirected to the new domain, that means something is wrong with the .htaccess tweaking. In this case you should try other .htaccess 301 redirection.

WordPress plugin (only for WordPress website or blog)

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Features:

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll and custom fields (optional)
• Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects
• Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional)
• Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional)
• You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on
• Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post
• Highly configurable

Drupal plugin

• http://drupal.org/project/linkchecker

Tool to check dead links in any website

• http://www.joomlaspan.com/webtools/webpage-broken-links-checker.php
• http://www.searchengineoptimising.com/find-broken-links-with-link-checker

Logo branded homepage

I had seen lot of website used branded logo at the homepage. Somehow the number of websites that still doing this are decreasing. Logically, a website that do this could annoy potential readers as the readers need to click appropriate button before that can view the real homepage. Somehow, if you believe that your website need branding, you can still practice this.

Article directory homepage

Since an article directory has too many articles in the site, the homepage must be able to tell visitors what is in their site. Otherwise the visitor might not know about those great articles that lie deep within the article directory.

Search engine like homepage

I am sure you are aware that Google is a copycat of Yahoo. But now Google rock more than Yahoo. The simplest design of the homepage and the catchy name are probably the main factor. They know internet user come to their page just for one thing, to search for information. And that is what they give. Nothing more and nothing less. Simple yet powerful.

Portal like homepage

Although blog rules over static website in the current day, static website still exist nowadays. These kind of site doesn’t need to care about commentator at all and can focus on writing informative article to the fullest.

Sales letter

This is just a standard sales letter that internet marketer frequently uses to sell product online. The sales letter need to be keep as simple as possible so that readers focus can be fully direct to the letter instead of the website.

Landing page with mailing subscription form

Some landing page is done just to get the mailing information of the readers. Once you get the mailing of the reader, you can get to him easily by mail. Usually you need to have good reason or gift for a reader to be a part of your mailing list.

Web hosting style homepage

Most web hosting websites have a few banners in the front page to show the current web hosting promotion and the great deals they offers.

As human language creators and users, we know naturally what the subject, predicate and object is and how they are used in speeches. However to an electronic computer made of circuits and its programs, this seems to be a little beyond their capabilities. So markup languages come to rescue. They are in essence a container of regular information – article paragraphs, human dialogs, a photo or a minute of sound recording, adding meta data about the primitive information that we are going to use with computers. Therefore, computer knows by the meta what the information is and how it should be processed in regards to our needs.

What is meta data anyway? To be simple, it’s just the information of information. For instance, in the following sentence

>> He eats the keyboard and takes the display on his back everywhere he goes.

It seems very natural that we have here a subject (he), 2 objects (keyboard and display) and 2 predicates (eat and take), but how would a computer know that?

We tell them.

With markup language, we are going to first analyze the sentence ourself and second mark them up for computer processing.

>> He eats the keyboard and takes the display on his back everywhere he goes.

HTML is full of such tags as (indicating a paragraph) and Disney (creating a link to disney.com). They are the meta information telling the computer what the embraced content is. Sometimes there might be a little more meta that could be found in the tag attributes such as informing the processing agent (a computer program responsible for analyzing and parsing the texts marked up, such as Firefox, a web browser) that this table contains information in the language of French.

Daniel Young is the author at kavoir.com, helping other fellow web developers.

The Dragon Ball website was then forget and I never build any website until 12 years later. That was the first time I know that a blog based website can easily be built by using free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress. I never I imagined I can have a website in just a few clicks. Blogger service make your life easy but it is too limited. I want more than that. I want to tweak and enhance my blog to the fullest.

And that’s when I learn about content management system (CMS). It took me days to configure how to install CMS such as Joomla and WordPress at my own PC. And then it took me some weeks to find the proper plugin and suitable themes for the installed blog. After that it took me another hours and money to buy web hosting and moving the related files to the hosting company. Just to have a proper installed website, I had used huge amount of time in gathering the exact information and testing them.

Only after that I know that most web hosting companies offer automatic installation for famous CMS. That means once you buy a web hosting, you can have a pre-installed blog or web site in just a few clicks. Amazing right? It looks easy if you already have basic knowledge like me. The tools in the web hosting control panel is meant to ease web master tasks. However those tools are not going to be any help if the user doesn’t know anything related to web development.

So, if you want to start a website so that you can be a geek web master, try to do it the hard way first. After that you will see that the principle for installing and using a CMS is the same with other CMS. By installing and preparing a website by yourself, you will learn about database, FTP, chmod, setup domain name, configuring website for SEO, and a lot more. Somehow if you are a businessman or someone that need a website as fast as possible, it is better to just ask for web designing service. Price for a web design service never be the same. All of that depends on certain factor like these:

Competition

To be honest, it can costs thousands if you ask someone around the town to build a website for you. This is due to the low competitions in the town. If you check for online web design services, you can actually find someone to create at a cheap price. That’s because there are too much competitions in the internet and web designer cannot survive if they mark up too high for the service.

So does that mean it’s better to use online web design service? That depends on your need. If you use local web design service, if will be easier for you to meet with him and properly discuss about your needs. Later you can easily find him if there are some tweaks that you need the web designer to do. Compared to local web design, online web design can be cheap but also dangerous. You just don’t know who you are dealing with. And if something goes wrong, you cannot just meet him without spending extra time and money for journey. Unless you are properly sure that the online web designer has high profile and has good portfolio, it’s always better to opt for local web design service.

Theme or template of the website

Most web designer today is likely to built your website using CMS software. The open source software is actually free but that does not mean it is not good. Open source software such as WordPress and Joomla always release new version or patch so that the security is up to date. Since the software is free, the only concern is in preparing the theme for the installed website. If you prefer beautiful, cool, or custom theme, I am sure you need to pay more compared to using free theme. If you want a website for business purpose, spending some money for premium or custom theme will not hurt you. Premium and custom theme will separate your website from average designed websites. This is where your professionalism shine.

Articles for the website

Remember, a website is useless without any content. Also remember that web designer is hired to design, not write articles for the developed website. If you still want the webmaster to write all of related articles or information in the website, the price for the developed website are likely to increase.

Several software can be used for FTP purpose. Free but good FTP software is like FileZilla and SmartFTP. You can use the software to access your hosting server just by login using appropriate FTP address, username, and password that can be obtained from the Cpanel.

Another advantage of using FTP is for space sharing within the same hosting. In the Cpanel you can create new account that can only access certain folder inside the hosting. However it is not recommended  to share hosting space with someone you are not familiar with since there might be a chance for the user to find security hole and access to other folder. Although it is difficult, it is possible for experience hacker.

Since the CSS file is keep in cache and reuse when the website is browsed, changes made by the webmaster cannot be seen instantly. Instead of the updated CSS, the website that is browsed will still use the old CSS that is kept in the cache.

In order to view the website using the updated CSS, the user need to either clear the cache or press CTRL + Reload button that usually works with most most browsers.

Picture: http://www.madrasgeek.com