All right, so I was at a conference almost all day today presented by Eastern Data (EDI).  Standard technology conference, a few speakers from the deep-pockets, and a big room full of booths with crowds of people everywhere.

Microsoft had a pretty big presence, bringing their cross-country tour showbus, AMD and Intel spent some money there, and there were booths from every company from Viewsonic to Logitech to Tyan to Crucial to Benq to Asus to Koolance, etc.

Anyway, enough background, story time.  I went with a  business partner of mine, Brian.  We showed up a bit late, registered at the front desk, got our name badges, bags for swag, and a few freebies to start it off (t-shirts and such).  They also gave us a raffle ticket for some prizes given out after each presenter and some plastic poker chips for vegas-style tables set up around the convention.  We walked into the first speech presentation and listed to AMD ramble on for a while, and then they called the first raffle prize.  Brian won it!  It was a brand new, high-end AMD processor.  He was all happy, because there was about 1,000 people in that room, and he was the lucky one.  Then someone else rambled on, and they announced another prize, a very nice Microsoft laptop carrying case”¦ and I won!  Now, people all around us saw me and Brian talking and making wise-cracks at the speakers, so they knew we were together”¦ so it felt really strange getting up and claiming the prize after Brian had just won.  I was afraid a mutiny was about to hit from all the glares, haha.  Anyway, we then went to walk around with the vendors and see all the booths.  After we got bored and couldn”™t carry any more free tshirts, pens, brochures, or stress balls, we went to the blackjack tables scattered around the room.  We used the couple of plastic chips they gave us earlier, and Brian quickly lost all his”¦ however I didn”™t.  I started winning, and winning”¦ I went all in a few times, and kept winning.  Before I knew it, I had a few tens of thousands of dollars in play money.  Now we were feeling incredible about that, so I decided to cash out while I was still ahead, and we took our ticket to the prize table.  We got there and realized it was $100 play money for every single credit, and the prizes got pretty expensive fast.  I thought I might be able to at least get a coffee mug or something small.  Well the lady we got was very confused and hyper-active, and obviously couldn”™t do math, because I ended up leaving with thousands of credits worth of prizes, haha!  I got a nice Intel jacket, a few nice polo shirts (Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Cisco, and Oracle), a few tshirts, some mouse pads, a few cool/strange looking coffee mugs, and another REALLY nice laptop carrying case.

So there I am, walking out of the convention with 4 bags of free stuff, so heavy I can barely carry it”¦. probably worth a good five hundred dollars in total.  It was quite a day. 

Heh, and unfortunately I’ve been hit by another wave of work, and I’ll be very busy for a while again too. I’ve been traveling all over the southeast on corporate server repair calls (usually Sun boxes), as well as doing heavy web development for a few companies. We’re also in talks with Comcast and Costal Computer Corporation about rolling out some joint-marketing ventures in the CRM industry.

I also called the printing company about the e30 tshirts today for United Bimmer, and I’m sending them the original image in a second, so hopefully we can finish the design work and begin printing in the next week or so. I’ll keep you posted on that.

And also, in my endless free time, I’ve formed a conglomerate network site for all my sites, to bring them all together. It’s called Eldium Interactive. http://www.eldiuminteractive.com and it’ll add a bar to the top of all our network sites like this: http://www.eldiuminteractive.com/showbar.php (example). That should connect all the related sites a bit better, and also help our search engine optimization greatly, since it’ll unite the entire network with a single website, rather than scattered links everywhere. Oh, and if anyone has any experience writing Press Releases, contact me.

Thanks guys, and hopefully things will clear up soon and I can resume more-frequent posting.

The domain name is the absolute most important part of your website.  If you have the greatest website in the world, but a horrible domain name, your return visitors will be minimal.  Okay, to the point, here are a few simple tips that can help you choose a truly unique and successful domain:

- Keep it common with a .com, .net, or .org TLD… plain and simple.  Sure, you can find better names with a strange, or less common extension”¦ I even have a two letter domain in another country code, but it”™s useless.  If you want a site to be successful, stick to the main three.

- No dashes; that makes it more complicated to remember and easier to forget.  If you”™re going for repeat visitors, try to keep the margin of error as low as possible.

- Think of something that flows when spoken, like MySpace. Nothing with awkward vowels or multiple words with the same sound starting and ending, for example: pandas anniversary.com.  It doesn”™t have the same ease of flow like “œMySpace”.

- Don”™t choose a name that”™s too long. The longer the name is, the harder it is to remember”¦ and type in.  As a rule of thumb, keep it under two words.  thebestwallpapersiteontheinternet.com may be catchy, but isn’t practical.

- Choose a domain that cannot be confused for a plural tense… nothing that a plural version of one of the words would still make sense (grey area here). For example, there is an existing site called car-wallpapers.net, however, there is another, completely different wallpaper site at www.car-wallpaper.net.  Something as simple as a plural noun in the domain can be the difference your advertising and branding helping someone else”™s monetized website.  Try to choose a name that the plural wouldn”™t make sense, or is a completely different word (less common), such as Amazon”¦ very few people would confuse that and type amazons.com.

- I’m trying to think up a brandable name. Something like DieselStation.com (another car wallpaper site), which is catchy, but applies. A name like car-wallpapers.net is simply not brandable. It should be clean and simple, but catchy and apply directly toward your product in general.  Be unique, and creative.

- Sub-product branding.  The psychological side and branding is everything in a domain name.  The longer a visitor stays on your site, the more engraved your domain name should be in their mind.  For example, HostGator, a rapidly growing hosting company, names all their packages along their brand lines, such as Hatchling (small package), Baby Gator (medium) or Swamp Gator (large package).  This might sound cheesy, but it drills the name HostGator into the visitor”™s mind.

- Do your research.  Ensure there”™s no preexisting website out there that is similar to your name.  Even if it”™s a letter or two off, you want to ensure your domain brand is your own.  A perfect example of this is the car aftermarket lighting company I”™ve done web development for, Umnitza.  There is another, completely separate company called Umnitza-East, and whenever anyone tries to support Umnitza-East, the majority of the people end up going to umnitza.com and buying from the wrong vendor.  Granted this is completely their mistake, the same concept applies.  You don”™t want to tell someone to buy something from your store at miceparadice.com, and them accidentally buy from mouseparadice.com, your biggest competitor.

That”™s about all the tips I can come up with for now, however I do plan on expanding this in the future, and branching off a completely different article on website branding, so stay tuned.  :)  Feel free to leave comments with questions or suggestions.