One of the things that always makes me think outside of the box is when “the real world” and “my outside life” intersects in serendipitous ways.
As it’s nearing the end of June it was coming close to the time to start registering the girls for summer swimming lessons. We had received a brochure in the mail a few weeks prior but like most publications issued by government bodies, even local ones, clarity is something that is usually missing. At the bottom of every page they listed the web address for local town (the Town of Hempstead) www.toh.li. Now the little voice inside my head says “hmm I know long islanders are a pretentious bunch but I’ve never heard of a small area getting it’s own TLD”.However Mrs. GW is hovering over me and we have a task to do so it’s put to the side. The next day I got a brochure in the mail for local businesses and in it was an advertisement from Wantagh.li looking for local businesses to sign up. I remembered talking with Jeff (aka Webwork) at the last pubcon about local search and domain names, so I checked all the registrars I use and nobody was selling “.li” tld’s. After doing some poking around I found out “.li” is actually a country code for Liechtenstein and domain registrations for “.li” and “.ch” (Switzerland) are handled by Switch.ch. After doing some surfing I didn’t see any residency restrictions so it looked like I was good to go. I did some keyword research and came up with some decent generics and now the proud owner of 7 “.li” domain names. I started out with a list of about 50 domains but the others were registered, curiously with no parking page. So I have a few quickie sites to build this week and some basic local optimization to get rolling.