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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Domains

About cnrgp.com


We've registered dozens of Internet domains, many for an ill-fated effort in 2005 to create a network of local construction industry news web sites. I should have followed my own advice on marketing before starting that project -- patching together a sloppily constructed website network on the hopes that people would actually be interested in stale news generated far away from the local communities the sites were intended to serve!

Nevertheless, domain registration these days is inexpensive and our business vision indeed calls for real publications/services in the communities served by the domains, so we're keeping them active. At present, the domains point to our 'old' websites; we are constructing something new that will provide a solid service for everyone who visits -- with exceptionally thorough local coverage where we have meaningful publications/presence.

Nevertheless, we've been labouring with a cumbersome and long domain for corporate and general email -- buckshon@constructionnrgroup.com, for example, is really easy to mis-type and wraps around pages, and so on.

So Daniel Smith set out to find a shorter domain. Three and even four letter relevant domains are virtually impossible to find these days -- unless you want to pay a small fortune; and things looked challenging until Daniel discovered that five-letter cnarg.com had become available. So I went ahead and 'registered' it, putting the work of implementing the actual name switch to a time when I was a little less busy.

However, when I failed with repeated efforts to post email changes to the new domain, I looked more closely -- and had a suddenly sinking feeling when I realized that I had mistakenly registered http://www.cnrag.com, switching the "a" and "r" in the middle of the domain. And someone had grabbed the originally planned 'cnarg' domain in the meantime. '

But sometimes solutions happen quickly. I tested http://www.cnrgp.com and, discovering its availability, immediately registered it.

Now we are beginning the domain reference switching process. Don't worry if you've bookmarked or saved for email the old email addresses -- they still work. And I am reminded that attention to detail and checking things carefully are not my greatest strengths -- but I am quite good at recovering from my blunders.

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