Domainers, for the uninformed, are people (or groups of people) that register large quantities of domains with the intent of reselling them for substantial sums of money. Have you run into a domain owned my a cybersquater (domainer)? Usually the page displayed is generic, and contains ads. Most of the time there’s also a link to make an offer to buy the domain. Yeah, it sucks that the domainers taking half of the good domains and not utilizing them, but they’re not about to stop anytime soon. They’re making hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars off the domains they sell.

So how can you get a good domain with all of this going on? You have three options:

1. Buy from a domainer
2. Come up with a creative domain that’s available
3. Look for an alternative TLD

If you just have to have that cool domain, go with option one. If you’re the creative sort, keep looking. The last option is to look for a domain with a different TLD. What’s a TLD? A Top Level Domain is the .whatever suffix on domain names. .Com isn’t the only TLD on the web. You could use a country level TLD like .us (great if you get something like www.stupendo.us), you could use .net, .info, or something else. There are plenty of alternatives.

Some counrtries have even made their country level TLDs available to the general web population, deciding that they don’t need them all to themselves. The republic of Tuvalu has made .tv domains available through several major registrars, and you can also get .fm and other country TLDs. .Tv and .fm are great for vidcasts and podcasts, as I’m sure you noticed.

Personally, I’ve been wanting a whole new TLD as a .com alternative. After years of wait, we’re finally getting one. Sometime in 2008, ICANN will create the “.web” TLD. It’s a general-purpose TLD that’s being introduced because of the overcrowded .com and .net. Finally! Of course, the domainers are going to have a field day, registering every word in the dictionary, as soon as it goes online. So you may want to keep an eye on ICANN’s website. I’ll probably register a few domains for future use, before their taken. I have some ideas for NTugo that would be better if they had unique domains.

So if you plan on starting a blog next year, but you’re not ready yet, keep an eye out for the .web domains!

A TopicCard is basically a business card, but instead of telling people about your business (or website), it tells them about a topic. You don’t even have to pay a printing house for your cards. If you have Photoshop and a printer, you can easily make your own business cards.

A TopicCard should ideally include

• Your logo
• The URL to your site
• A header explaining what the card is about (i.e. “What is RSS?”)
• A short text blurb explaining the general idea of the topic
• An URL pointing to a resource that teaches more about the topic. This could be a post on your blog, a category page, another website, or virtually anything on the web.

I used TinyURL for the “What is RSS?” card, as it was the first time I tried something like this (try fitting http://www.videojug.com/film/rss-in-plain-english on a 2-inch-wide piece of cardstock!). If you don’t want to use TinyURL, you can use your own redirection system if you prefer. You can either write your own PHP/MySQL/mod_rewrite system for redirection, or install a pre-made redirection script like Shorty. Shorty works great when it’s installed in a directory like “go,” so your redirects look like www.you.com/go/here.

I wrote my own redirection script, because I wanted more power than Shorty offers, and I like having absolute control of how my scripts work. Once my stock of “What is RSS?” cards is depleted, I’ll print new ones that use my custom redirect script instead. I’ll simply edit my PSD to have NTugo.com/go/rss/.

Once you’ve printed your cards, you just leave them on bulletin boards, hand them out to people, etc. Just carry a few with you wherever you go, and look for opportunities.

What can you make a TopicCard about? Search your blog’s archives for ideas. If you can’t find anything appropriate, write a new post.

Bonus Tip: Include an image related to the topic. You can see a small RSS icon on my “What is RSS?” card. Note that it looks cool if you put an image on a layer beneath the text, with the opacity lowered so the white background bleeds through.

Here are some reasons to make content maps:

• It’s useful to know the structure of your website.
• You can compare a map of your site with that of a competitor’s, and one-up them by tweaking your design to excel in ways that theirs doesn’t.
• It’s fun to analyze websites you like (especially ones with cool designs).
• Do you have too many ads? Look at the ACN (Ad-Content-Navigation) ratio.

How do you make a content map? Keep reading to find out.

First you want to get a screenshot of the site you want to analyze (let’s use Ars Technica as an example). I recommend using a tool like the Screengrab! Firefox Extension to capture the entire page. Open the image in Photoshop.

Note: Since Ars Technica’s main page is very long, I’ll only be using the portion of the page “above the fold” for this example. For your own usage, I’d recommend using the entire page.

Now that you have a copy of your screenshot open in Photoshop, create a new layer above the screenshot and set it’s opacity to about 60%.

Now it’s time to start drawing boxes. Grab your Rectangular Marquee tool, and set the foreground color for the color of your choice (I’m going to use a blue color). Make sure the active level is the new one you just created, and select a portion of the screengrab that (on the real version of the website) contains content (not ads, navigation, or branding). Press “Shift+F5″ to bring up the “Fill…” dialog. Make sure that “Foreground Color” is the selected option in the dropdown and click OK. You should have something like the following image.

Now repeat the last step until you’ve put transparent squares over all of the content-bearing areas. You should have something the the below image.

So you’ve got the content portions taken care of? Now do the same thing for Advertisements, Navigation, and Branding (logos and such). Here’s an example of the finished content map:

That wasn’t so hard, was it? As you can tell my looking at the map, theres an an unusually large amount of navigation. On a lot of websites, navigation isn’t given enough attention, despite it’s huge importance. It’s nice to know that some sites are placing that much of a focus on navigation. How important are each of the things highlighted in the map? Here’s a list, in order of importance:

• Content
• Navigation
• Branding
• Advertisements

Content is obviously the most important part of a page, after all isn’t the content the reason people come to your website? Navigation is second, because you need to be able to easily find more of the content. Next you have branding, which tells the users where they are. Last, but not necessarily least (I run ads on my websites), you have ads. Ads are important because they help keep a site running (as do donations).

Content maps are both useful and fun. You should definitely consider making one of your website, and possibly comparing it to another site.