"A smart, personalized targeting ad solution that provides premium content. This ad unit is CPC and is designed to be your highest performing ad unit (eCPM)."

So I went back to Network Solutions, and there I was able to register the name - at three times the price. I think this practice is wrong on a lot of levels, but the main one is that contrary to what Netsol CEO Champ Mitchell is saying to the media lately ("After the search ends, we will put the domain name on reserve. During this reservation period, the name is not active. If a customer searches for the domain again during the next four days at networksolutions.com, the domain will be available to register. If the domain name is not purchased within four days, it will be released back to the registry and will be generally available for registration."), it is bad for the consumer. Their pricing is prohibitive to other registrars, and just because someone searched on a name, doesn't mean it should be temporarily taken off the market, in effect giving Netsol a monopoly on that name for several days. This issue needs to be addressed by ICANN or someone who has the regulatory powers to ban such practices.

This was about 5:30 AM EST - I guess they are working on something.

We tried to do this job as inexpensively as we could for the client. I will try to give you an idea of what the means from a web designer/developers prospective.

First, since the client is in Italy, we had to find an e-commerce solution that would work with their banks, etc. I did a pretty thorough search and came to a lot of dead ends. I finally decided that Zen Cart could give us what we needed in a shopping cart (too much really) and decided to use PayPal for all forms of payment (Zen Cart has a pretty straight forward integration with Pay Pal).

One of the reasons I went with Zen Cart was that I found a pretty decent template for a jewelry store that I planned to adapt to fit our clients needs. In hindsight this may not have been the best way to start with Zen Cart - I may have learned more about their templates and page creation options, etc. if I started with their default template (which is so ugly though it may scare you away from the solution altogether).

Anyway - we ended up changing the template quite a bit. You can change most of the layout of the page from the control panel (where things show up, when they show, etc.) and you can change fonts, colors, and other elements from the style sheet. We now have a custom header in place, and have changed most of the colors.

The most time consuming part of this project was getting the photos of the jewelry. We went through a couple of fits and starts, and once we did finally get the images, we did spend some time doing some extra editing. Then you have to upload the images, put all the products info in, etc. Zen Cart handles this all pretty well - but it does take time when you create 50 new items.

So the site is now live, but we have yet to do any promotion. Depending on what the client wants to spend we will take some time to submit the URL to search engines, make some blog posts about it, and look for directories and other places where it is appropriate to list it. On their end they need to figure out who is going to be in charge of filling the orders!

This project came in at about $5,000 US. That included registering the domain and finding the host, installing the shopping cart, designing the cart and site, inventory upload, and PayPal integration. If you need an on-line shopping solution, give us a shout.

They have a pretty cool page strength tool that every webmaster should probably check out from time to time. They use a proprietary blend of factors from publicly available sources (Yahoo!, Google, Alexa, etc.) to come up with an overall "Page Strength" score that shows you how "strong" your site is on the web.

My advice is always to never do anything "black hat" - it just isn't worth it. If your business plan/model doesn't allow some time for natural search engine growth, and a marketing budget to get off the ground, then you probably need to rework it. I will be writing more soon with some specifics on what you can do to help a new site get found.

$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

"Advertisers who want to park search ads on AOL might be better off driving there directly rather than taking a tour with Google.

AOL's move to sell Google-style search ads last month could be a boon for advertisers who want search-based text ads to appear on AOL but not lesser-known sites in Google's ad network, search marketers say.

Following up on a deal struck in 2005, AOL last month began selling AOL-branded versions of Google's search ads, giving advertisers an opportunity they never had before. It's an opportunity many appear be eager to take, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, which helps companies place ads online."

I don't know if this is really "news" or not and will be interested to see how others in the industry spin it. There are some other interesting items in the article - like this - "The problem is that Google's partner network also is inundated with so-called domain-parking sites." Hmm...