As I had hoped, version 1.0 of Bahamas.CO has launched, with a few days to spare. The website was built on WordPress, and I opted to use a heavily modified template due to time constraints (I needed to have the site launched by August 20th) as part of the .CO Registry’s Founders Program.

The template modification was completed by my web designer Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design, who has done the majority of my design work for the last three years. Usually he builds my sites from scratch, but he knew I was under the proverbial gun on this project, and he jumped in to make the necessary template modifications. For those that are curious, I used the Los Angeles template available on ThemeForest.net (affiliate link) for $32 out of the box.

I also previously mentioned that the logo was designed as part of a contest on 99Designs.com, and ironically the winner of the contest was Theo Develegas of Acroplex. Not only was it my favorite logo, it was also voted as the favorite by you guys, which is always a good thing to see.

I had around 40 articles created by a writer I found on eLance. I added all of the articles, found photos on iStockphoto.com and Flickr, and I coordinated the photos and articles. I still need to do a bit of internal page linking in the next few days, to better enable people to find the pages.

For the next couple of months, I will monitor the website, work on SEO, add articles and photographs, and see how it performs in the search engines. With some extra work, the traffic will grow, and I will begin to work on phase two, integrating a hotel and activities booking engine. In a few months, I will update you on traffic stats and the all important search engine stats, which will be interesting to me (and probably you) because of the .CO domain name.

Until then… thanks for reading.

What a weekend so far. Not such a great goal for the US in yesterday’s World Cup match against England, but we’ll take it. I feel badly for the keeper though since this will surely be a Bill Buckner-esque play that will go down in history, especially if England fails to advance. Tonight is a big Celtics game, and today is a great day to relax and enjoy the weather.

Here are a few things that may be of interest.

• There was a great article about Warren Royal and his Bobbleheads.com venture in the Albany Herald, a local newspaper in Georgia. The article discusses how Warren acquired the domain name and then built the popular website.

• If you have been thinking about applying for a .CO domain name via the .CO Registry’s Founders Program, now is the time to do it. Applications are due no later than June 15, 2010. I am in the process of applying for one, and if I am awarded the domain name, I will chronicle the build out process, as I am required to have the site launched by July 20, 2010. As an alternative, you can try to reserve one at a registrar like Register.com.

• While thinking about the June 15th deadline, I also just remembered that 2nd quarter estimated taxes are also due on the 15th of June. If you need to pay estimated taxes, don’t forget to mail them out tomorrow (note to self).

• Someone emailed me about an adult-ish website that was hosted on Blogger that got taken down. I know it’s been said before, but you really need to consider this type of thing when you use a service like Blogger or even possibly WordPress. I don’t know if the site was removed, or if the owner was able to access his articles/posts, but it’s important that you control your content rather than be reliant on another company.

• Just a reminder, the cost of .com domain names will be going up very soon (July 1), so now is the time to take proper action. You can renew your domain names for several years in advance or you can transfer them as some companies like Name.com have transfer specials going on right now.

• It looks like Rick Latona is moving into other areas in addition to domain names and watches. His newly re-launched RickLatona.com website has a section for diamonds, timeshares, and loans.

• Francois Carrillo has started his own domain blog at DomainWare.com. His first post discusses why some Domaining.com accounts have been canceled. With all of Francois’ ventures and domain sales, this is going to be an interesting blog to read if he updates it frequently.