Category: #citieswiththeirdot

A trip around the different continents through five domains

Posted on by Comunicació

We’re making the most of the summer again this year to take a virtual trip around the world through five city domains. Interestingly, all of them were approved by the ICANN in 2014, coinciding with the .barcelona domain, as part of the expansion of the GLTD. Want to find out which ones?

We start our journey in .paris, a domain aimed at businesses, organisations and individuals based in Paris or who have a close connection with the city. Projects with the .paris domain include the website for the Louvre (louvre.paris), one of the most important art museums in the world, and the Paris Opera (opera.paris).

Still in Europe, we can take in one of the key cities for history and contemporary art. We’re talking about .berlin, the domain for the German city of Berlin. One of the most notable websites is for the Stiftung Planetarium Berlin (planetarium.berlin), which features a wide array of activities, from visits to the observatory to concerts and a cinema programme. One of the most iconic theatres in the city, the Friedrichstadt-Palast, has also opted for a .berlin domain for its website palast.berlin. Interestingly, there’s also a band by the name of .berlin. You can discover them on the website theband.berlin.

Next we’re taking a plane to .joburg. This is the domain for Johannesburg, popularly known as Joburg, one of the main cities in South Africa. Representatives of this domain include the annual art event of Open Studios Joburg, which is held in May (openstudios.joburg). There’s still a few months to go, but it’s interesting to take a look and discover the local artists.

After packing our bags again, we’re off to visit .melbourne in Australia, a city which stands out for its cultural, artistic and culinary wealth. On the website dosomething.melbourne we can find numerous leisure options for enjoying the city.

The last part of this digital trip around the world takes us to .quebec, the domain for the province and city in the east of Canada with its French legacy, rich in culture, history and nature. One notable website is fabcity-montreal.quebec, an initiative promoted by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the Fundació fab and Barcelona City Council, with the aim of connecting international cities wishing to be self-sufficient, productive cities in the local sphere and connected globally.

Our peculiar trip around the world ends here. We wish you the best for the holidays and we’ll see you again in September!

Around the world in five domains

Posted on by Comunicació

GeoTLDs promote local identities on the internet thanks to geographical domains. This makes them the perfect way of getting to know cities all around the world without leaving your home. We’re proposing a trip around the world by visiting five city domains. Are you coming along?

Our journey begins with .barcelona, a domain which has been operating for six years now and has more than five thousand registered addresses. Browsing the various types of .barcelona domains offers us a first-hand look at some of the city’s most typical and iconic sectors. For instance, through cultural domains such as the one used by Park Güell; gastronomy, such as the domain used by La Boqueria, or meet.barcelona, as a way of getting to know the city and what’s going on there. In just a few clicks you can tap into the city’s heartbeat. But we already knew about this domain, so let’s pack our bags and move on!

Our next stop is .stockholm, one of the most singular city domains in that it is limited only to websites relating to the City Council in this city. A good example is start.stockholm, where we can find general information about the city and a clutch of .stockholm websites for the various services which the City Council offers its citizens.

Changing continent, we visit the geographica domain with the most registered websites in the world, at over 302,000! This is .tokyo, the domain for the Japanese capital. Here we can find the website marathon.tokyo, for international runners, along with visit-chiyoda.tokyo and visit-minato-city.tokyo to discover neighbourhoods in Tokyo, or japanfreak.tokyo, for those interested in curious aspects of Japanese culture.

From here we hop over to one of Australia’s cities with its own domain, which is .sydney (the other is .melbourne if you’re wondering). This city domain has over seven thousand registered sites, including cycleways.sydney, a website with maps and routes for getting around the city by bike.

Our journey continues with one of the most visited cities in the world, as we stop off at .nyc. The city that never sleeps has over 68,000 registered domains. We can find sites such as greenwichvillage.nyc, with everything that’s going on in the neighbourhood, and newyearseve.nyc, for those wishing to recreate the legendary New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square, so often seen in films.

Finally, the last stage of our journey takes us to .capetown. The domain for the South African capital has over four thousand registered domains. These include wanderer.capetown, to discover various routes around the city, iseeyou.capetown, a project seeking to give visibility to different collectives and fight to eradicate the discrimination and inequalities that still exist in a city as complex as Cape Town.

Cities that have got the dot: .stockholm

Posted on by Comunicació

We’re launching a new section at .barcelona looking at other cities with their own domain. One of the best known examples is Stockholm, which in just a few years has managed to make .stockholm the domain for all websites linked to the city council in the Swedish capital. A fine example of the use and implementation of a city domain.

We spoke about the .stockholm domain in an interview with Marcelle Abou Haidar Johansson, head of projects at the Department for Communication at Stockholm City Council.

Marcelle, what is your role within the .stockholm organisation?

Before becoming a project manager with the Department for Communication at Stockholm City Council, I worked with the domain register for the .se and .nu domains. Thanks to this prior knowledge, in 2016 I was asked to join the Department for Communication at the City Council to manage the project launch for the TLD .stockholm.

Since then I’ve been working to implement the TLD in network communications, as well as the updating and development of new websites for Stockholm City Council.

The .stockholm user profile is exclusively institutional, although it will gradually be opened up for other private users. What profiles do you think will be the most interested in using the domain?

As we had an “internal launch” with .stockholm only being used for the city’s organisation, we hoped this would give the TLD an identity status of belonging to Stockholm. As a result, I think the domain will be of more interest to businesses and organisations whose identity is strongly linked to the city of Stockholm.

Over these few years we’ve had various enquiries from small and medium-sized businesses in the city who wanted to be able to register a .stockholm domain. Judging by this, we think this will be the profile with the greatest interest in the domain.

What values for the city of Stockholm are the most recognisable for users of the domain?

Since we introduced the new .stockholm websites, the domain represents more advanced and modern technology which is better suited to users and to web accessibility. This comes in addition to a strong link with the city of Stockholm.

Can you explain the most characteristic success story for the .stockholm domain?

Personally, I love the work we’ve done with the main website for the city’s organisation. It’s a multi-site where various smaller sites converge both visually and technically. Each of these sites is for a specific service offered by the city. For instance, a nursery school (förskola in Swedish), a home for the elderly, business services etc. They all have their own .stockholm domain. This really helps with communication about a specific service. To use one of these examples, if we want people to enrol their children at a nursery school we direct them to förskola.stockholm. There we provide all the necessary information on how to enrol, along with everything else relating to that service.

This represents a change compared to the structure for our former website, where all the information was grouped together in the same place with a tree structure. That meant over 3,000 pages in the end, making it pretty difficult to find the information you were looking for. Even direct links were longer. The new format is much more direct and easier to understand.

What’s your go-to city domain and why?

The first two websites we created, förskola.stockholm (pre-school) and äldreomsorg.stockholm (elderly people), served as a way of testing the new structure and are the sites which citizens have been using the longest. Because of this we’re very fond of them, plus the fact they’re the most popular.

That said, my favourites are äldreomsorg.stockholm and motionera.stockholm. Firstly, because I worked personally on the conceptualisation and launch of both sites, but also because the result was a big improvement on the way users accessed the information before. They’re also very pleasing visually and the domains are spot on in what they communicate. This is one of the main reasons I love working at Stockholm City Council with the .stockholm domain.

How did you decide that the .stockholm domain would be exclusively for institutional use?

It started by chance. There are certain laws and regulations that prohibit the City Council from charging for or making any financial gain from a service unless this is decided on by the City Council itself or through one of its companies. As the application period for ownership of the .stockholm domain was shorter than the time it would take to make a decision over it, the team working on the .stockholm domain application at that time decided that it would only be put to institutional use.

Naturally, the plan was to open it up to the general public later. Even so, now that we’re using it this way it seems very natural to us and the best decision for the city of Stockholm.

How did the process go to switch all the council websites from .se to .stockholm?

The heaviest part of the work was to turn Stockholm.se into various smaller websites with .stockholm domains. This process was quite a challenge at many points. The biggest thing was the work prior to the change, considering that each municipal service is decentralised and most of them have their own communication staff and managers. In most cases, our central communications office came up against the fear of informing the rest of the municipal organisations that we wanted to change all the domains of one Sweden’s biggest websites.

Our website consultancy agency also had little knowledge of how to switch to a TLD that had never been used before. This meant they were also very cautious and reticent to start with.

But speaking to other people in the domain names sector, observing the experiences of other cities, regions and brands to see how they worked with their domains, helped us to draft an action plan for change.

The thing that concerned us most was losing traffic from search engines, which roughly accounted for 60% of all the traffic to the former website. In our preliminary research we reached the conclusion that the most important thing was to make sure that all our visitors would continue to find what they were looking for. Each of the pages from the old site were therefore assigned a new page and a new website. As we made an effort to eliminate unnecessary text and clean up the existing content, the result was that at times 10 or even 20 pages were redirected to a single page of the new website. We had 301 redirections from old links!

As we expected, in the first few months we dropped in terms of SEO, but later recovered. We also launched the mini independent websites one by one and linked them all together. The first two sites on pre-school and elderly people thus helped with later websites as they had achieved good positioning.

As a complement to this work, we’re changing other city domains (besides stockholm.se) to the new .stockholm. This work is still ongoing, but is simpler now as we have got past the heavier work at the outset.

Do people identify the .stockholm domain with Stockholm City Council? Do you think that’s a positive change?

I’d like to be able to say yes straight away, but I honestly think there are two types of people: those that take an interest and pay attention to domain names and those who simply want to reach the information they need. The former do look at the URL and identify .stockholm with the City Council. The latter probably haven’t even realised we’ve changed the domain, even if they use it every day. This group is bigger and perhaps the most important reason behind our good positioning in search engines, because without them they might not ever find us.

Generally, we see a very positive change and we’re very happy with the feedback we get from visitors to our websites.  All this is thanks to the work we’ve done with the website, working with our identity, brand profile, content, user testing, accessibility, SEO and more.

.stockholm, a domain to explain the reality of the city on the internet

Posted on by Ana Tapia

How to transfer over 3,000 website pages to a city domain.

Stockholm City Council has been working to revamp the stockholm.se website, with over 3,000 pages and thousands of documents and links, and transform it into start.stockholm.

The ICANN approved the .stockholm domain in 2015. In contrast to other city domains such as .barcelona, .berlin and .london, Stockholm opted from the outset to make the .stockholm domain exclusive for its City Council’s digital resources and for some cases of interest, such as important events in Stockholm.

When it came to designing their new website, they took user experience and common browsing patterns into account.  The same space allows citizens to access different services in the city. If somebody wants to apply to enrol their child at a nursery, they can also access the healthcare service for the care of a family member. Once the sections were chosen, they created their own .stockholm domains, all accessible from start.stockholm.

The first two sections, or websites, to be up and running were the nursery section (forskola.stockholm) and the care of the elderly section (aldreomsorg.stockholm) at the end of December 2018.

The migration of all the information to the .stockholm domains concluded on 29 January with the publication of the website start.stockholm. In under a month this has become the top result when anybody searches for Stockholm.