Monthly Archives: May 2007

Passed-off domains, the STD of the Web?

Over the last eight months I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress of a project that I used to work on which is now being run as a commercial operation. The site enjoyed very high ranking in Google and was in the top five results returned for most terms associated with its core activities.

To reflect the move from the fluffy academic world to the cut-throat business world the new owners wanted to swap from nameofproject.ac.uk to nameofproject.co.uk Continue reading

Web sites on the cheap?

I recently read an article in Information World Review called “MPs award themselves a website pay rise“. It wasn’t so much the main content of the article that caught my attention (the communication budget of MPs had been increased by £10,000 to help support development of their Web sites) but a rather bizarre quote within the article:

MPs’ websites generally follow the same pattern of content: a biography, parliamentary work and announcements, constituency and national news, and lots of photos. But even the slickest of sites should cost no more than £7,000 to set up and around £1,000 a year thereafter to maintain.

The above was attributed to Dominic Johnson, managing director of Miramedia (http://www.miramedia.co.uk).

What surprised me were the figures…. £7,000 to set up a site and £1,000 for maintenance. I’ve no idea how these figures were arrived at but what troubles me is the one-size fits all argument for Web sites. Continue reading