Yesterday’s Guardian film & music section carries an interesting article about website design. It begins:

In the mid-noughties, Northern Irish power-poppers Ash were signed to a major label and had the website to prove it. "We had a fancy flash site that looked great," says singer/guitarist Tim Wheeler. "It was set up to launch an album, but there was no way of maintaining it or updating it regularly ourselves. It was frustrating because we had to go through webmasters. It was one of those sites you look at once and think, ‘Oh, very good, but why am I here?"

The writer argues that bands need web sites (and, interestingly, that MySpace and Facebook don’t meet this need) and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Regularly changing content is essential ("The worst thing a fan can see when they visit a website is the same thing they saw last time"). Beyond this, go for a style that suits you: don’t feel pressured to be more formal – or more informal! – than is comfortable. A site that reflects your personality is more likely to appeal to your fans.

Within the past week two customers have received remarkably similar emails from Asian companies which say that they have received an application to register a domain name which is the same as the main part of your domain name (eg, in our case it would be cornwellinternet). They may mention trademark and anti-cybersquatting issues. They ask you to get in touch quickly or they will go ahead and register this domain name which is similar to yours.

This is a scam and you can safely ignore these emails should you receive one. That’s the short version. There is more information here.

And while I’m on the topic of scams, people with international domains (.com, .org) are still receiving letters from Domain Registry of America, Domain Registry of Europe and similarly named enterprises, usually just less than six months before the domain they mention expires and offering to renew it. These too are a scam, see this article. The main give-away here is the 4½pt small print on the back of the letter. Most of our customers let us handle the domain renewal and this is something we do in the three months before expiry (unfortunately we cannot do it any earlier than that). The cost in included in the annual fee.

…to Valerie Laws on her Commendation in the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition for her poem Lifting the Lid.