Today I found an interesting post on UK Webmaster forum about something new in the domain industry – City of Los Angeles decided to create it.s own top level domain extension .LA. As it turned out this is actually not so new according to Temi’s SEO Blog.
Will it become a new popular movement with many other extensions to follow?

The interesting part that all most popular names that could be in high demand were reserved and already offered for sale at the premium price anywhere from $1000 to $50,000 . For example “girls.la” or “star.la” are priced at the highest $50K while “kids.la” or “gifts.la” could be acquired for only $1K.

Personally I think these new TLD extensions would work for a local business and can actually be kind of useful to identify company as local. It may be even cute to have your name registered as a domain with local extension if you want to show off where you live…

For the website looking for global exposure this new local domain in my opinion will do no good…

When designing a layout for your website it is essential to check it in multiple browsers.

Few years back over 90% of web surfers were using Microsoft Internet Explorer but nowadays other browsers fast gaining share of the market. Most popular are Mozilla Fairfox and Opera.

Even Internet Explorer has released new version (IE7) which works much different from the preceding version (IE6).

Layout and styles configured to work fine in IE may appear all broken or not readable in other browsers. I can guarantee – no one will open another browser just to see your site, so you will loose potential customer.

Multiple browsers can be easily installed on your computer without any interference with exception of IE versions – you can have only one version running.

This is even more important if your site has anything to do with web design services. Recently I did some research on local web design companies just to check competition and found very interesting thing… Some of those companies are claiming to be in web design and development business for years and display tons of feedback from so-called happy customers. Amazingly many of their own sites appears to be very poorly styled and appear broken in Fairfox… Would you consider to hire one of those companies to develop your site? I don’t think so!

So… Take your time to make website multi browser compatible or hire someone to do it for you – you will appreciate it later.