The ICANN has approved a new TLD, .xxx. It probably won’t be seen anywhere until June, but there have been over 250,000 registrations already. Apparently, there is a system set up to make sure the domains only go to people IFFOR deems as “officially in the adult entertainment industry.”

I agree with this article in that there have been many useless TLD’s coming out in the past decade, some of which may be put to good use, but with .xxx for adult content, .AERO and .travel for those areas, what’s next? .train, .car, . bicycle?

A few days ago I read an article that talked about the increasing number of smartphone sales in the years to come. Here is the article. It might seem a little astounding that by 2012 more people will be buying smartphones than computers. Now, I don’t think the increase in sales will be quite that big, but it will still be a huge part of the design world. I think it will take a long time for many small town web designers to take this into account, leaving a lot of clients either getting something that won’t fully promote their business or spending thousands of dollars for a large professional design company. There’s nothing wrong with that if you choose to do so, but it’s always good to have some options. Now, I don’t know how many years it will be until there are very few new computer sales to the point that web designers actually build their sites from their smartphones, but until then people will have to put greater focus on cross browser compatability for smartphones. How does this affect domain names? Well, I don’t really know of the .mobi domain names will become that much more valuable, but I think short .com and .net’s will be much more valuable, even more than they increase regularly each year. That is simply because people with smartphones don’t always have the advantage of a full size keyboard, and a 5 or 6 letter domain name would be much easier for them to get to. I’m going to start developing an android app soon, which will be a tutorial program for things like HTML and CSS on the go for new designers.

There are many different domain registrar. Godaddy, Register.com, moniker, too many to name. Most are similar in price for .com domains, around $10 a year, but others charge upwards of $30 a year. I use Namecheap, which is a reseller of enom. It’s cheaper than enom, and I can get free whoisguard on new domains. The DNS servers are very fast to change compared to other hosts I’ve used, and everytime I’ve needed help the chat was available and ready. I also like the control panel, it’s very easy to navigate. However, I don’t really appreciate the methods of payment, which is probably one of the most important things with a registrar. With Namecheap, you have to transfer money into your account to make sure they get re-registered every year, with most registrars it’s automatic with credit cards. Hopefully that will change in the future though. Also, hosting plans with them aren’t exactly the best deals, you could go elsewhere to find a host. I’ll leave that to another post though.