The simple answer to this question is “the solution that works best for you.” In fact, you’d probably assume this statement is a way of getting out of producing an answer. However, this is a solid truth that I’ve seen time and time again. I don’t try to force clients into the biggest and baddest option simply for sake of, “well… it’s awesome.” I’ve had the pleasure to see some really happy clients on not so super powerful tools, simply because they needed a quick and clean way to sell t-shirts with no major bells and whistles.

So if you’d like to continue on, I’ll attempt to produce some detailed scenarios and reasons why I’d suggest a client to go one route or another. We will compare various hosted solutions such as Shopify and Volusion, to self-hosted frameworks like the powerful Magento, to the up and coming OpenCart. I’ll even introduce you to a few eCommerce applications that successfully integrate with self-hosted WordPress installations. I will not cover every single eCommerce solution in the world as to keep the gist of this article on track. However, if you have a favorite eCommerce framework that we haven’t talked about, we’d love to hear your pitch down in the comments.

Within the last 5 years, we’ve seen an explosive growth of Open Source and Premium eCommerce Frameworks. This growth is a natural response to the increase of demand, surprisingly despite the state of the economy.

From what I’ve read, Reinvigorate has been around since 2002, however in early 2009, MediaTemple presented them with an offer to be part of the (mt) Ventures program. With the backing and additional resources Reinvigorate has reinvented itself (pun intended) with a new Beta program. Reinvigorate is in the same realm as Google Analytics, being a hosted service. Mint, another great website statistics tracker is a self hosted service, meaning you’d have to install and maintain on your webhost.

My website is under WordPress on a MediaTemple hosting package. After creating my Reinvigorate beta account and adding dereksneed.com, I was given the tracking code scripts to place in my header similar to other Analytics apps. I noticed however, that one of the options tabbed out was WordPress.

UPDATE: As I was producing this blog post, I received an e-mail from the Reinvigorate Team, that Monday August 30th, 2010 would finally be the end of Beta Status.****** I will continue my review and thoughts on the new pricing in a week or two. Derek

Introduced in 1991 the .co TLD (Top Level Domain) was only intended as a country code extension for use by Colombia. In 2001 a Colombian University who managed the domain extension had the idea to commercialize .co, making it easily available worldwide. This idea was rejected by the government and other organizations at the time. Fast forward to 2010, a partnership between a U.S. and Colombian corporation created .CO Internet S.A.S., who now manages the domain. .CO Internet S.A.S. has finally obtained approval to market the .co domain internationally. Why give you this bit of Colombian history? Well it seems most websites promoting the “new” domain don’t actually mention that it’s not a new domain. I think it’s important to know that the origins of your domain purchase were originally a country based one.

CO Internet S.A.S. and it’s authorized registrars are marketing .co as a great alternative to it’s TLD brother .com, with hopes that users will feel comfortable identifying and using the domain. Additionally, you could surmise that “co” stands for “company.” Countries other than The United States will already be familiar with the .co acronym as it’s often used in what’s called a Second Level Domain, examples are www.yourname.co.jp for Japan or .co.uk for United Kingdom. As world wide web years pass, registrars are always pushing the newest hot domain extension that will save your website and search rankings. Understand that purchasing domains help with recognition and protection of your brand, yet the extensions have shown not to be of any benefit to your SEO efforts.

So should you buy up some .co’s? Some may argue that their clients may become confused for the previous Colombian connection, as for me, I don’t believe any of my U.S. clients will encounter that issue. Basically if you own the .com version of your business name, you should purchase the available .co version just in case. It’s a matter of protecting your brand and website. An easy example is missing the last keystroke when typing a domain, www.youtube.co …hit enter….. In that instance, YouTube should hope no one else owns the .co version, especially if deemed a malware site. Many large companies have already adopted .co for this very reason. Twitter has acquired t.co for their new Tweet Button’s inhouse URL shortening system.

 

If you like free swag, register a .co domain.

There is another camp who believes you should not start buying up .co’s for your next business idea. Let’s say you want to buy www.snowboarding.co and attempt to brand, socialize the name and SEO the website, you might run into trouble or user confusion as www.snowboarding.com has been running around for some time. This is an issue with the .net .us and .biz versions as well, yet I believe more prominent with .co. Now I’m not talking about those domain parker’s who just want to make some advertising bucks via your mistaken clicks. These guys are having a field day with the new .co’s. I’m talking about businesses and brands on the web being careful with their newly chosen brand. Just remember you could run into legal trouble or lose traffic out the gate to the .com variation already owned by someone else.

A .co registration is more costly than their famous counterparts .com, .org and .net, however nothing to break the bank. Most domain registrars, like GoDaddy are running around $29 per annual registration. Speaking of money requires us to ponder if this is just another money making attempt to sell something that has no real value, masquerading as the “new it thing.” We have seen it before from our registrars, .info .biz are examples I never opt to deal with.

It’s just going to take time to see if .co is widely adopted by the general public. Judging by the 400,000 registrations so far and Google treating .co as a global domain in it’s Webmaster Tools, I’m going to go ahead and say “.co” might be an okay alternative in some contexts.