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Type-A.xyzGoDaddy customer (Philippines)

#GenXYZ how do you normally start your day? Quick morning workout? Or a big hearty breakfast? The team here at XYZ loves nothing more than to start our day off with a nice cup of coffee. With coffee shops on every corner and thousands of brands to choose from, it can be hard to establish your place in such a booming business. So how does this week’s #WebsiteWednesday manage to stick out? (Besides the .xyz domain of course!) Type-A.xyz is breaking the mold with their own take on cold brew, delivered right to your home or business.

Type-A.xyz is located in Manila, Phillipines and is a cold brew subscription service. Their cool and functional bottle design is what gets customers interested, but the great taste is what keeps them subscribed. Their coffee is single origin from Panama, and the low-extract process creates a light flavor with hints of fruit. But what really makes Type-A.xyz shine is it’s brilliantly designed bottle. The outside is marked with serving measurements, so you know exactly how much to pour. Simply pour 1 measurement of the bottle with an even amount of your favorite addition, such as creamer or milk, and add ice. Fast and simple for any morning, and an easy solution for that afternoon pick me up.

“We are fans of specialty coffee but admit that there are days when making a hand brew from scratch is just too much work. With Type A, a cold brew made from 100% Panama beans, we wanted to develop an instant specialty coffee that retains all the nuanced tasting notes of a crafted coffee (ours are dark chocolate and orange peel) – just add water.

We want Type A to be synonymous with cold brew coffee, and grow a community of A-types who love the brand. In fact, we’ve started a blog (type-a-intel.xyz) to talk to them about everything from recipes involving Type A to essays about things that would interest overachievers, say, how to deal when your dog has OCD.

We liked the suggestion of “a to z” when you type out the URL. We’re overachieving that way.”
– Anna Canlas, Type-A.xyz

We love seeing the #GenXYZ continue to be at the forefront of innovation. From custom 3D printing, to functional and fun community living spaces, to A.I. text unscramblers, we’re always proud to provide a domain as unique as you are. If you’re ready to get some of Type-A.xyz’s cold brew for yourself, you can subscribe here. You can also follow them on Facebook or Instagram to get the latest updates. Do you think you have the next great idea? Then lock down YourIdea.xyz now, and keep changing the world!

Team XYZ is heading back to SXSW again this week, and that means our SXSW Scavenger Hunt is back too! But in this year’s Scavenger Hunt, you don’t have to attend SXSW to be entered to win, you can join the fun from wherever you are.

There will be a total of 5 prizes awarded and winners will be selected through a raffle drawing. First Prize will snag the Nintendo Switch, Second Prize will take off with the Camera Drone, and Third, Fourth, and Fifth prize winners grab the PublicSpace.xyz swag bags.

The more entries you get, the better your chances are to win, so make sure you remember all the ways you can gain entries below:

  • 1 entry: Follow @XYZ on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (1 entry added for each platform)
  • 5 entries: Post a photo of any of our purple people on social media and tag @XYZ, #XYZsquad, and #SXSW (5 entries are added for each platform)
  • 25 entries: Register a .xyz domain between March 12-15, use code SXSW18 at checkout to get your domain for $1, and tweet it to @XYZ (25 entries are added for each .xyz domain you register and tweet to us)

No Purchase Necessary. Purchase does not enhance the chance of winning. Void Where Prohibited. To see complete official rules, head to www.gen.xyz/sxsw.

The contest is open now, so you can start racking up those entries right away. Don’t miss your chance to join in on the SXSW party with us and take home one of these amazing prizes!

We’ll be sharing our experience at SXSW with you on our Instagram, so be sure to stay tuned and follow us as we take over Austin again this year. Good luck to all the participants in the Scavenger Hunt; we’ll see you again on Friday when we announce the winners!

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Sammy6000.xyzTucows customer (United Kingdom)

We always love seeing another creative professional using an.xyz domain to display their personal achievements and talented skills. In the past we’ve brought you the digital animations of SoaLee.xyz, the visual novel ghost adventure of Ghostpia.xyz, and the 3D art pieces of Lumatic.xyz. But for this week’s #WebsiteWednesday we’re excited to feature an intriguing new creative designer currently residing in London, Sammy6000.xyz.

Sam Jacobs, or better known as Sammy6000.xyz, has achieved a lot in the design space across the globe. In Shanghai, China he helped to co-found a creative agency called Jellymon, where he resided as the creative director for 9 years. After much success they were even able to open up a second office in Beijing. During this time he also co-founded China’s first street art gallery Da>Space. But this past year he took on an exciting new challenge: Creative Director at the world-renowned news station The Guardian.

“I wanted to create a portfolio site that stood out, on which I could show off an edited selection of my projects. I would like to develop the site further in the future, but I don’t have specific goals beyond having a nice place to put my work.

[I chose to build on a .xyz domain] because .com seems boring and predictable. It also sounds old fashioned. A .xyz domain sounds fun, cool and is really memorable. It just matches my style more and what I wanted to get across with my site.”
– Sam Jacobs of Sammy6000.xyz

During this impressive career climb, he has been able to work with multitudes of big name companies, such as Adidas, Nike, Converse, and Red Bull. He was even able to land the first ever design collaboration with a Chinese State-Owned company, The Shanghai Watch Company. But his hard work doesn’t stop at just design, he also has done research projects for BMW, Hennessy and Apple.

We love the uniqueness of our #GenXYZ community and are proud to give everyone an easy way to express themselves online. The best part about art is that every piece is new and different, and what better way to stand out than with an .xyz domain? So why wait, check out right now to see if YourName.xyz is available, and show the world your passion!

ViceRoyal.xyzNetwork Solutions customer (United States)

Our #WebsiteWednesday series is filled with artists behind some of the biggest brands and entertainment projects in the world. There’s Xand.xyz’s art direction on ad campaigns for Adidas and Nike, JHill.xyz’s character animation on Titanfall, SoaLee.xyz’s VFX animation in The Last of Us and Uncharted, and HBO’s microsite for it’s critically acclaimed hit show Silicon Valley on Hooli.xyz, just to name a few. This week we’re highlighting another creative member of #GenXYZ who has worked on many of the biggest films and games of the past decade: ViceRoyal.xyz.

ViceRoyal.xyz is a portfolio site displaying the work of JP Monroy, art director at leading VFX animation company Whiskeytree. JP’s list of credits working on box office smashing movies is nearly endless, including the Iron Man, Hunger Games, Captain America, and Thor series, The Avengers, Rango, The Revenant, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, The Big Short, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and many more. JP has also worked on some of the most popular video games in the world as well, including League of Legends, Best Friends, and Need for Speed.

JP also uses his site to show off his original works of fine art, including paintings and drawings inspired by many different styles and artists. The split between JP’s personal and professional works of art on ViceRoyal.xyz are a display of the two halves of his life as an artist, and a unique way he utilizes the personal portfolio site format.

“It had been a while since I had my work up, so I thought this portfolio website would be a great way to consolidate my commercial work in VFX and my personal projects. Showcasing all my work with a tailored interface will hopefully allow me to collaborate with other artists and keep my creative output up to date.

I chose a .xyz domain I spend most of my days staring at 3D software, having the X,Y, & Z axis in the name felt appropriate.”
JP Monroy, Creator of ViceRoyal.xyz

Your .xyz domain is what you make it, and JP has made his ViceRoyal.xyz domain into a site that projects his art and vision just as far as the movies he’s worked on have. What’s stopping you from making your own personal site and projecting your own passion to the world? Join JP and register YourName.xyz today to get started showing your talents to the world.

When you’re building any website, there are a few hard and fast rules that will always apply. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making something simple like a website for your wedding or something more complicated like a platform to connect members of your organization, the basic principles of “how to build a website” are the same for everyone. In this blog post we’ll share the basic best practices for building a website that you should keep in mind.

Best Practices for Building a Website:

1. Think about the big picture first, and take care of the details later

When most people start building a website, the common mistake they make at the start is focusing first on very specific aspects of their site, like choosing a background picture or deciding where to put a certain block of text. While these things do matter, spending too much time on them will make a website less organized and add a great deal of time to the process of building a website. What you should do instead when you start to build a website is:

  • Outline the strategy for what you want to achieve with your website
  • Decide on the image you want to present about yourself or your brand to your visitors (i.e. your website’s “aesthetic”)
  • Start to build out the most essential, “big picture” pieces of your website

The “big picture” pieces of your website will be determined by Step 2…

2. Before you build out the content, create a site map

An example site map:

Think of your site map as the skeleton of your website. The bubbles and lines in your site map are the bones that connect everything you build on your website together. When you build your website map:

  • Start at “Home”, and add all the main pages you want your website to have
  • Map out which pages navigate to which, and be sure to keep your map organized (like the image above)
  • Make sure the most important parts of your website get the highest accessibility

3. Keep your website’s content concise

Nielsen group estimates that you have about 10 seconds of a visitor’s time to get their attention and keep them on your page. Having huge, unbroken blocks of text on your site is a basic error often made when building a website, and unfortunately it can be one of the most damaging as it gives your visitors reason to navigate away. To avoid this error when you build your website:

  • Write 1 to 2 sentence paragraphs and keep the language simple and easy to read
  • Use headers to get the most important information across, and keep titles short
  • Use bullet points to highlight important points, and avoid using text in images

4. Create clear “calls to action”

Think back to your site map and the main goal you had when you set out building your website. The pages at the end of each line in your site map should have a direct call to action that accomplishes the overall goal you want from the people who visit your site. Below are a few examples of good, clear calls to action:

  • Appmaker.xyz has their main call to action right at the center of the homepage, and it’s perfectly placed around short text and example images that entice you to click right away.
  • On TheLushLife.xyz, celebrity wine sommelier Sarah Tracey has a dual call to action on her website, as the newsletter subscription page also featured embedded posts from her Instagram, working as a secondary call to action to visit her social media page.

5. Keep the look and feel of your website consistent throughout

After you’ve built your website strategy, drawn your site map, optimized your content, and placed your calls to action, the last consideration you need to make is the overall feel of your website. This is where you need to give special attention to images, stylization, content placement, and anything else that comprises the “aesthetic” we discussed in at the beginning of the post. Think about:

  • Keeping your website’s color palette consistent
  • Using relevant (preferably high-def) images
  • Keeping content blocks separate and avoiding overlapping images or content that create a “cluttered” look

Learning how to build a website that perfectly accomplishes everything you envision is not as difficult as it seems. If you keep these website building best practices in mind, your website will look and feel exactly how you want and will attract the visitors you’ve targeted for it.

This is the first in a series of blog posts we’ll be sharing about best practices on the web, so stay tuned to learn about everything from picking a domain name to making your website secure. You can also head to gen.xyz/101/build-a-website for more in-depth information on how to build a website including logo design, using HTML/CSS, and more. Be sure to check back next month when we’ll discuss how to make your website mobile-friendly. Until then, head over to our YouTube channel to see more internet “how to’s”.