On my way to work I drive past a house, the owner currently has their car for sale – I’m not 100% sure what the car is because the only you get is that there is a sandwich board outside with 3 words chalked on;

“Car for Sale”

Now, I can’t imagine anybody driving past being enticed by this sign to find out more – the sign is making the assumption that someone is looking for a car, and the current owner has a possible answer for them. You can’t actually see what the car is – it’s parked down the driveway, partially hidden from sight.

In the offline world, and in this case specifically – facts are required. Car for sale could of been the title that lead into a bullet point list of facts and figures – what is the car, how many miles has it done, how old is it, what features does it have, and how much is it being sold for.

Now, online – as an initial statement, as a domain name – carforsale would be brilliant. Google – the most popular search engine with approximately an 80% market share uses the domain name as one of the most important matches to a user’s keyword search. Although, funnily enough – a Google UK search for “car for sale” does not bring up the carforsale.co.uk website – but this is probably because it’s not a website, just a holding page and has as much detail as the sandwich board!

I recently switched things around at work in regards to our email system. I was originally receiving all our work emails on my powerbook as well as all my personal and work related emails. which meant i always seemed to have a large amount of emails in my inbox, so i moved all the emails to do with the day job to a computer at work which has dramatically freed up my emails on my laptop. This also meant that i had to set up a new email address for my freelance work contacts – i was always using my work email for this.

so the problem now was what to put before the @martinlucas.co.uk for an email address. the obvious is my name, i.e. martin@martinlucas.co.uk which a lot of people do, but it’s something that i don’t like because of the repetition and i didn’t want the boring and predictable;

info@
contact@
mail@
email@

so i had a look around at work other ‘cool’ companies out there had. i know that i had seen websites with something different before the @ before – but purposefully looking for those wasn’t easy.

one of the more popular things to put before the @ was a greeting of some sorts, hello@ was found at a number of sites and i think this works really well – it’s casual, inviting and drops the rather stuffy and tired info@. but it still wasn’t quite right for me, as i wanted the email address to be (at least almost) grammatically correct, so you could actually say out the email address and it would make sense.

this limits the choices somewhat to verbs that came be done at a person or a place. here’s a couple that i came up with;

wink@ – way too flirtacious, but pretty fun
shout@ – would be great if it was for my dj site
sayhello@ – what i ended up going for

so i went with ’say hello at martin lucas dot co dot uk’, i think it works quite well. it asks people to contact me at my domain name, it’s an email address and a direction – it’s also quite casual without being too familiar and possibly off putting to potential clients and customers.

i stumbled across this website the other day and thought it was quite amusing and a cute idea – but it’s also quite helpful to us web designers. the site is DN Scoop and it basically takes a lot of search engine style information and statistics about your domain and gives you a value in dollars. it’s pretty much a round about way of how well your site is positioned on the world wide web as it checks things like incoming links, google page rank and alexa rankings.

my domain is worth $161, which isn’t a lot when you compare against google ($1,740,000,000), amazon ($1,446,912,000), facebook ($252,300,000), apple ($366,400,000) and microsoft ($397,440,000)!

check it out yourself here; www.dnscoop.com.