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The Mysteries And Future Of Websites By Naseem Javed, President, ABC Namebank Websites have just completed a full circle of a hard struggle, and somehow survived where other traditional marketing tools and old principals failed big time.

Websites have just completed a full circle of a hard struggle, and somehow survived where other traditional marketing tools and old principals failed big time. Now the same sites and domain names must face harsher realities once again, all to ensure high visibility and exposure they so provide. Today without visibility, on e-commerce, websites are simply doomed. While billions of web pages poised for the right match, only clashing into billions of surfing customers are simply flooding each other. Millions of splashy logos with billions of expensive web pages are all deeply submerged in this ocean of e-commerce. Customers all over the world are only amused as they watch the websites struggle to gain attention at a zillion choices per second. Their mysterious behavior on search engines and the role of alpha-structures of each and every domain name is now a very big question. Why?

Boom time, a million domain names a day were registered. Those days, most unusual, silly and totally dysfunctional names were the sought after icons of get-rich-quick dreamers of the exuberant populace. 99% of such names failed. Exhausted or expired such names have now disappeared. While ICANN and the domain registrars wonder on the disappearance of continual registrations and renewals, the real question now is the fate of the remaining millions of business domain names in active use on global e-commerce today.

From its inception, when the genius founders doodled on a napkin and came up with the big five suffixes: .com, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, and .org, and declared "www" as the one and only key to cyberspace, changing business forever. This weird and strange thing called a domain name costing pennies in comparison to a trademark registration, was often left to webmasters or junior staff to play with. Today, if a domain name issue is not being dealt at a senior boardroom level, then behold the quick demise of that corporation; from marketing to branding and just about everything else it does. A URL is the only key that opens the gate to a corporation, its products, images and identities. There is no other bypass to the URL to access a website. As the old-fashioned print-driven advertising and branding has taken the back seat, the marketing and survival strategies for these new cyber-branding issues are all on the forefronts.