Sorry for the light posting this past week. I have been in New Hampshire and Lowell, Massachusetts doing research for Lowell.com. Now that the base of the site has been built, optimizing it for search has become the main priority. This involves going through each page, changing meta tags and anchor text to make sure each page can be seen and read by Google. Not so much fun, but a necessary part of development. Hopefully the fruits of this labor will help with the ranking of Lowell.com.

Once the website has been optimized (although I think it will be an ongoing process), I am going to begin seeking advertisers. In my visit to the city of Lowell spanning a few days, I met some business leaders and city leaders, and I was warmly received. I hope they saw my passion for this site, and I have really taken a liking to Lowell. My goal is to make the site mutually beneficial for the city, its residents, its visitors, and the businesses who will advertise on the site.

For now, it’s back to the optimization process. I should be back to blogging next week.

Top Notch Domains, LLC, a New Hampshire based domain investment and development company has acquired Burbank.com for an undisclosed sum. Burbank is one of the fastest growing cities in the state of California, with a population of over 100,000 residents. Previously, Burbank.com was used as a private Burbank news website.

The city of Burbank is known as “the media capital of the world,” as many of the largest media companies have headquarters or significant production facilities in the city, including Disney, Warner Brothers, and NBC. Burbank is located approximately ten miles from from Los Angeles, and it is home to one of the fastest growing airports in the US. It has beautiful homes, is a center for business and has a strong economy.

“We just launched our first geodomain website, Lowell.com, and I am looking forward to the development of Burbank.com,” said Elliot Silver, President of Top Notch Domains, LLC. “I am excited to fly out to Burbank on Jet Blue - non-stop from JFK, to begin researching this great city.” The company anticipates that a mini-site will be developed in the coming month, and Burbank.com will be fully developed by the end of Q3 2008.

Top Notch Domains, LLC also owns Salinas.com, which is currently being built into a guide of Salinas, California, a city of around 150,000 residents in California’s wine country. The company recently put the name for sale, but is reevaluating their position.

There is still some work to be done, but I am happy to announce that I have launched Lowell.com! While my developer and I are still working out some of the kinks, we are at a point where we are able to release the first version of the Lowell.com website. I know it’s not perfect and many tweaks will need to be made in the coming days, but this is all a learning process for me, and I hope the launch of the site encourages others to develop some of their domain names.

There are still some grammatical, SEO, linking and other various issues, but I am comfortable enough with the presentation to launch it. If you notice anything funky - be it grammar, punctuation, spelling, links…etc, please be kind and drop me a note. This is my first “real” website aside from my blog and corporate site, so the learning curve is still pretty steep.

I would like to thank everyone who helped me by giving fantastic advice and recommendations. I really appreciate it. And to those people whose emails I haven’t responded to in the last couple of weeks, I apologize. Feel free to send them again and I will try to respond more quickly.

I apologize for not updating the Lowell.com development blog in a while. For the last few weeks, I have been busily trying to finish, revise and edit the Lowell.com website, and I think we are getting very close to launch now. Basically all of the pages are done and set, but it’s just a matter of going through to make sure there aren’t typos, ensuring that all of the links work and take people to the proper places, and just cleaning everything up. There will be many tweaks made after launch, but I want a presentable website launched before I begin soliciting advertisers.

Since the last update, I made a major change in the execution strategy of Lowell.com. Previously, I intended to use phpMyDirectory to allow me to include a full directory site that would be easy for businesses to update and enhance their listings. After spending quite a bit of time thinking about this - and even starting the work on this, I decided to change course and not use a full directory. There were several reasons for this decision, and I expounded on them on the Lowell.com blog.

I plan to write a couple more updates in the next few days, and hopefully the Lowell.com beta site will be launched by the end of March or first week in April! We are only a couple of weeks behind, but I think that’s pretty good!

Last night I had the opportunity to speak with a new friend across the world, Ed Keay-Smith from OzDomainer.com. It’s amazing how people can connect on the Internet. Ed sounded like he was next door, and we had a conversation like we’ve known each other for years. When you have a chance, please check out the podcast. I discussed how I started in the industry, how I think the Snowe legislation could impact all domain owners (and how people can help), and I discussed my new experience in developing my domain names.

If you have any questions after you listen, feel free to post them here or on Ed’s blog, and I will be happy to respond. BTW, I hate how my voice sounds on answering machines, on microphone, and now on podcast

Podcast with Ed Keay-Smith

I went live with Salinas.com yesterday, and I wanted to share some information about the development process for those of you who have good names but fear developing them. First off, I would like to thank a few people who helped me develop the name and/or who gave me some fantastic advice on development. Without the help of Brad, Mike, Anna, Kim, Janis, Perry, David, and Michael, I wouldn’t have been able to build the site. I sincerely appreciate their help and advice. I have little to no technical expertise, so development is new to me.

In my opinion, Salinas.com is more of a mini-website than a fully developed site. Eventually I hope to develop Salinas.com into a directory site, but I am planning to test this development model first with Lowell.com - which should launch in the next 3 weeks. Although revenue is important, my current goal for Salinas.com is to increase traffic and provide a value for visitors. Revenue generation will be more important to me with the fully developed website.

Content is king for Salinas.com. I hired Read More »

As I continue to work on Lowell.com in anticipation of an early March launch, I would like to reveal our new logo. I wasn’t 100% thrilled with the logo that was selected before, and I was concerned about a potential trademark issue in the last logo. As you may recall, the logo I selected had an image of Boott Mill in Lowell, which is owned by the National Park Service. While it may have been okay to use the image on my logo, I was concerned about the impact of using the logo for commercial purposes. I intend to make shirts, hats, mugs and other giveaways, and I didn’t want to run into potential issues down the road.

I think this new logo is colorful and fun, and it looks nice. What do you think of the new logo? I would love to hear comments. We are not 100% ready to launch yet, so minor changes could still be made if you have any suggestions!

We are getting down to the wire, and it’s getting very exciting. I look forward to sharing the website with you when it’s ready to launch. I may need some testers to check links, grammar…etc, and if that’s the case, I may reach out. I really appreciate all the advice and guidance that has been given to me throughout the development process. Read More »

Top Notch Domains, LLC, a New Hampshire based domain investment and development company has acquired Salinas.com for an undisclosed sum. Salinas is one of the largest cities in the state of California, with a population of about 150,000 residents. The city is located approximately eight miles from the Pacific Ocean, and it is known for its exceptional agricultural industry.

“It’s been great developing our other geographic domain name, Lowell.com, which is expected to launch by the end of February. Once the Lowell.com website has launched, the development of Salinas.com will be our next major project,” said Elliot Silver, President of Top Notch Domains, LLC. “I am looking forward to learning much more about the city and visiting my friends out there! We will have a temporary website launched in the coming days.”

Top Notch Domains, LLC, a Nashua, NH based domain investment and development company, announces the recent strategic acquisition of TaxGuide.com and TaxGuides.com.

“The tax domain names were highly Read More »

I am beginning to develop another geographic domain name that I just acquired. I plan to announce the acquisition in a few days - once the transfer is final, but since the agreement is signed and the money is in escrow, I began to develop the name today. I am building a very simple and basic site, which will allow me to monetize it more easily using Adsense. While this isn’t going to generate substantial revenue, it will help protect the name from falling out of the Google algorithm.

Long story short, Read More »