Presentation given as part of a workshop at Indie Cork in October 2016. The presentation covers getting a domain name and building a website quickly and easily
7. Domain
• Don’t run your business on someone else’s online platform (e.g.
Facebook). They can change the rules anytime, or kick you out.
• You should make sure that your name is on your domain, not your
web developer’s.
• A domain name is your online address. It is the home of your online
brand and reputation. fishsticks.com , haircuts.ie ,
goatscheese.kitchen , hire.me
• There is a huge selection of new Top Level Domains to choose from
besides .COM and .IE. What about .FILM? .MOVIE? .VIDEO? .LIVE?
What About Social Media?
This is the title of our workshop – as advertised
But after the programmes were printed we realised that this is more of a mission statement.
There was a better way to describe what we’re going to do this morning.
This is what we’re actually going to do this morning
But we felt bad about completely changing the title … so …
That’s better!
And by 20 minutes – of course I mean movie minutes
Why do I need a website when I can have a Facebook page for free?
I got one word for you
What happens when the social network changes their algorithm?
What happens when your posts are removed without warning?
What happens when your images are deemed "unacceptable"? (And they don't need to be that salacious to be considered problematic by the rather prudish social networks)
What happens when your Facebook page is shutdown without warning?
What about when nobody sees any of your posts?
There are a lot of positives to using social media - we're not denying that. But unless you have your own website and custom domain name you will never truly be master of your own destiny. You'll always be at the mercy of someone else.
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We had a lot of fun with the .SCIENCE top level domain
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Practical – register a domain
The term ‘hosting’ is used to describe the storage of website files on a computer, so that they can be accessed over the World Wide Web. Every website is hosted somewhere. Hosting is where a website lives.
Hosting is built into the Blacknight Basekit website builder, but we also offer a range of other hosting products up to and including enterprise hosting.
Sexy means different things to different people
I work with people who find servers sexy. These people are vital to our organisation – they keep the wheels turning. They keep our servers up and available.
But we don’t let them meet the public
You don’t need to spend hundreds of euros to get a professional website developer
to build your site (but you may want to do so later).
● We’ll show you how easy it is to set up a website in minutes, with no programming
skills required.
Practical – register a domain
● Once you’ve built your site, you need to tell others how to find it.
● Google won’t do all the work for you to market your site effectively
You need to OPTIMISE your site, to help Search Engines, so they can help the
people who are looking for you to find you. This is called SEO - Search Engine
Optimisation - or simply Digital Marketing.
● Blacknight rankingCoach is an simple Do-It-Yourself tool which lets website owners
optimise their site to improve their search-engine traffic.
● Blacknight rankingCoach provides a simple checklist of actions which a user can take
to improve his/her search engine ranking.
Other Products / Enquiries
We also offer online backup solutions - for your website and for your office systems.
We have a range of email solutions for large and small customers, including spam filtering, MS Exchange Server and OX (Open Exchange).
We are a Microsoft Partner for Office 365. This is an online version of MS Office, and suitable for collaboration and online document sharing.
The term ‘hosting’ is used to describe the storage of website files on a computer, so that they can be accessed over the World Wide Web. Every website is hosted somewhere. Hosting is where a website lives.
Hosting is built into the Blacknight Basekit website builder, but we also offer a range of other hosting products up to and including enterprise hosting.
Other Products / Enquiries
We also offer online backup solutions - for your website and for your office systems.
We have a range of email solutions for large and small customers, including spam filtering, MS Exchange Server and OX (Open Exchange).
We are a Microsoft Partner for Office 365. This is an online version of MS Office, and suitable for collaboration and online document sharing.
The term ‘hosting’ is used to describe the storage of website files on a computer, so that they can be accessed over the World Wide Web. Every website is hosted somewhere. Hosting is where a website lives.
Hosting is built into the Blacknight Basekit website builder, but we also offer a range of other hosting products up to and including enterprise hosting.
So sponsorship is good, the arts are good, niche interests and community groups are all good.
And all of these groups include people who are our customers or potential customers.
But we wanted to go further – so we teamed up with a media company who organised awards events, and we inaugurated an awards ceremony designed to celebrate the SEXIEST people we know: the people who run small and medium enterprises or SMEs.
That’s understandable: I run a company called Blacknight. We’re Ireland’s number one domain name registrar and web host.
We started in a spare bedroom in 2003.
Now we employ 40 people managing 4000 servers, hosting over 220,000 websites, with 84,000 customers in more than 130 countries.
We handle 6 million emails every day.
We think that’s pretty sexy!
That’s me with my business partner, Paul Kelly.
The dragon looking over my shoulder is Bert – more about him later.
When we started our company in 2003, we knew all about hosting, and domains and servers and technology. We didn’t know about marketing.
But that was OK, because the people we were marketing to were geeks like us.
And like us, they thought Linux, and RAID, and PHP and databases were sexy.
But as the company grew, we ran out of geeks to sell to.
Don’t get me wrong – the geeks shall inherit the earth. You’re still very important!
But the problem is that the only way to sustain our geeky lifestyles, is to market our products to ordinary people.
Sexy people.
What do I mean by sexy?
“Sexy” is what turns you on – what’s cool.
Sexy is beauty – sure – attractiveness. But it’s also intelligence – it’s fun – it’s humour, it’s art - it’s what drives you, what motivates you, it’s what gets you going.
So lets get back to hosting. What can we learn from these people?
My company has over 40% of the Irish web hosting market – but by international standards we are tiny.
I can’t compete with large international companies and their big advertising budgets
Like Pornhub – my product is unmarketable.
Like Ryanair – I like to give the media something to talk about.
Like both of those companies – I think that creativity is perhaps the sexiest thing of all!
Content Marketing
We have two blogs, a podcast, a Youtube channel, and and we’re active on social media – especially Facebook and Twitter.
We also write press releases for the media – not just about our own news – but about topical issues relating to technology and security.
This is a blog post post we put out last week - which was shared by our local chamber of commerce in their newsletter.
Sponsorship of the Arts is a great way to make your brand sexy
On Saturday Next, the IndieCork Festival of Film and Media Art begins in Cork City – it will run for a week.
Blacknight is a sponsor this year for the first time. We’re sponsoring the Blacknight Festival Centre which will act as a hub for the festival – open 12 hours a day for 8 days – with our branding on it.
Our sponsorship is appreciated, not just by the organisers, but by the filmmakers and artists participating in the festival, by the patrons and supporters and the audiences attending the festival – by local community groups and elected officials
Who tweet and like and post their appreciation for our involvement …
And we make sure to capitalize on it.
Here’s our media guy Conn, attending the press launch for the event last week and shooting videos with the organisers and participants – he’s been working on putting these videos out on social media channels this week.