Tag: domain

Barcelona hosts a new meeting on top-level domains

Posted on by Comunicació

Barcelona is hosting the 50th meeting of the Administrative Workshop on 6 and 7 October. Organised by CENTR, the European association of top-level domain registries, the meeting provides a platform for debate on political matters which affect country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and acts as a communication channel for internet governance bodies and other internet organisations.

This is the third time the CENTR has chosen Barcelona to host one of its meetings, on this occasion the first face-to-face meeting to be held since the start of the pandemic. Fundació .cat, which manages .cat and .barcelona domains, will be the host organisation for this CENTR meeting.

During the 50th CENTR Administrative Workshop, organisations responsible for various domains all around Europe will be exploring various topics such as abuse relating to DNS domains and the creation of new products to add value to domains, as well as an assessment of new projects to integrate and improve the relationship with registration companies. On this occasion, Tucows and Openprovider are to be the guest registration companies, to learn about their perspective and share their experiences.

La Mercè is back!

Posted on by Comunicació

Music, tradition, street arts and plenty of festive fun are in store in the city from 23 to 26 September with La Mercè 2022. The festival regains a wholly face-to-face format, with no bookings required. At lamerce.barcelona you’ll find the full programme for a decentralised and diverse event offering hundreds of activities, with Rome as this year’s guest city.

 Highlights in this year’s programme include:

  • The opening speech. Film director Carla Simón has marked a before and an after in Catalan film and will be giving the opening speech this year.
  • Popular culture. In addition to the traditional opening ceremony, there will be human towers meetings, music, dance and film linked to tradition. This year’s festival also sees the return of the Nit de la Vigília after an absence of three decades.
  • The music and fireworks spectacular. The show returns to Av.Reina Maria Cristina, with a display combining light, colour and sound, and blending Italian and Roman melodies with music from a feminist perspective, opera to mark the 175th anniversary of the Gran Teatre del Liceu and music against war around the world, in a finale packed with energy and optimism.
  • Concerts. Consecrated artists, new talent and new types of creation form part of the programme, which consists of three music sections: the BAM, Música Mercè and Acció Cultura Viva.
  • Street shows. The MAC street arts festival offers innovative projects and new technological formats, with genres as diverse as integrated dance, contemporary dance, urban dance, street theatre, installations, workshops, circus, games, puppets, music and clowning.

You can find full details on this eagerly awaited edition of La Mercè on the website lamerce.barcelona.

The poster for La Mercè 2022

The author of the poster, David de las Heras, has brought together three generations of Barcelona women, representing a Mercè which transcends the passing of time and brings traditional and artistic creation together in the same celebration, remembering its roots and reiterating the city’s commitment to justice and peace.

If you wish, you can pick up a copy of the poster while stocks last at the Sala Ciutat (C/ Ciutat, 2), or download it here.

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.

Renewal rates for local domains stand at over 80%

Posted on by Comunicació

The GeoTLD Group met in the Breton city of Quimper on 2 and 3 June, in a meeting organised by .bzh, the domain representing the Breton community on the internet.

Headed by the Fundació .cat, and with the .barcelona domain as one of its members, the goal of the group is to promote local identities on the internet using geographical domains.

During the meeting, the GeoTLD Group presented a comparative study, highlighting the high renewal rate among a very large number of geographical domains, standing at between 80% and 90%. In some cases, renewals even topped 90%. Of all the geoTLD domains, .tokyo enjoys the highest number of registrations, with 302,574 to be precise. Besides .tokyo, the only domain with more than 100,000 registrations is .cat, the domain representing the Catalan-speaking community. Most geoTLDs have between 5,000 and 25,000 registrations, as is the case with the .barcelona domain. If we look at the number of domains per inhabitant, .barcelona comes out above domains such as .madrid, .paris, .sydney and others. Specifically, there are 3.23 .barcelona domains registered per 1,000 inhabitants.

The geoTLD meeting also covered various other topics such as the campaign for the emoji with the Breton flag, marketing practices geared towards specific solutions for the communities these organisations serve, and the evolution of the European regulatory framework for the internet.

Finally, Stockholm City Council presented its experience in transferring all the services in the city to its own domain, start.stockholm.

“Barcelona has got an international reputation in the world of graphic design, which we wanted to link to our website”

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Minsk is a graphic design studio which started life eight years ago. The studio has evolved over time, its members have recycled their knowledge, and little by little Minsk has become specialised in audio-visual projects using video, animated graphics and digital design. With the creation of the domain minsk.barcelona the studio has been able to link its website with its values and those of its clients. We spoke to Pere Gómez Gavaldà, a member of Minsk, about design and the .barcelona domain.

What sets you aside from other graphic design and audio-visual studios?

Even though we’re a small studio (there are five of us), the thing that specifically sets us aside is that we are multi-disciplinary and flexible, meaning we can take on all types of projects with the advantages of working with a small studio, offering personalised service and dealing with clients directly.

How important is it for a company in the graphic design sector to have a website?

In our case it’s essential, as precisely one of the services we offer is the design and layout of websites, so we need a website which meets the expectations of what we offer our clients.

Of course, it also acts as a showcase where we can publish our outstanding projects and create our own discourse (you can get the idea if you read the texts on the website). That said, and as people know, when you get on with things your own website sometimes ends up at the back of the queue, and admittedly we often don’t have the site as up-to-date as we’d like to.

How do clients relate to you when they discover you through your website? What differences are there when dealing with them personally?

In our case the website tends to be a tool we direct clients towards when they want to see examples of what we do, as the site features some of our most notable projects. We’ve also got clients who contact us for the first time because they’ve found our website (the truth is that without being experts in SEO, we’ve got it well positioned), and with these clients the advantage is that they’ve actually seen what we do and they’ve actively contacted us, meaning part of the work is already done.

Even so, personal treatment for a small studio like ours gives added value, and once we get a mail from a client who contacts us via the website we try to get together or call them to be able to speak to them directly, as that’s what enables us to work in a more agile and personalised way.

Why did you choose a .barcelona domain?

One of the main reasons for changing the domain is that although the .es domain is shorter, we felt that as a brand we preferred the idea of linking our company to Barcelona, which ultimately is our city and has an international reputation we wanted to link to our company.

What differences did you notice in the everyday activity of the company after launching the website minsk.barcelona?

Most of all, the fact of linking the brand to new values which are much closer to us, our values and those of our clients. It mainly helped us to avoid misunderstandings. We opted for a change in strategy and communications, leaving behind Minsk Disseny (our commercial name up until that point) and becoming Minsk.barcelona. On the one hand, because design is now just a small part of our work, and on the other, because we wanted to link our main name (Minsk, the capital of Belorussia and the imaginary world we associated our brand with) to Barcelona (our real city, with values which we sincerely identify with much more at present).

As a graphic design company, what do you get out of linking yourselves with the city of Barcelona?

A lot. Barcelona has long been associated with design in general (not just graphic). It was important for us to be able to link these ideas. In addition, the contraposition between Minsk and Barcelona also helped us create a friendly word combination which has been useful for playing with the dissociation we usually use as a communication value in our branding.

How much clout does the name of Barcelona have in the world of graphic design and audio-visuals?

A lot. I think on an international level people continue to see Barcelona as the national leader when it comes to design. The same applies with audio-visuals, although here it’s more spread out.

Model Barcelona Architectures Festival’s got the dot!

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The first edition of the Model Barcelona Architectures Festival is set to turn the city into an experimental lab from 5 to 15 May, the goal being to rethink urban environments and build new perceptions to move towards the cities of the future. The recently launched website model.barcelona offers full information on the festival.

The first edition of the Model Barcelona Architectures Festival gets under way with the theme of “Regrowth”, the aim being to explore new perspectives, lines of thought and values that will help refocus the growth of the city.

The ten-day event sees the city host a global dialogue on the conflicts, challenges and opportunities that converge in urban environments, with international experts offering their vision of the cities of the future.

Over a hundred activities

Jointly organised by Barcelona City Council and the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), the festival is to offer a series of debates in iconic spaces in Barcelona, as well as a tribute to Oriol Bohigas at the Ateneu Barcelonès and over a hundred activities organised by independent bodies. These include open days, workshops for people of all ages, physical installations and augmented reality, communal meals, routes, debates, exhibitions, book fairs and even a film cycle.

Participants in the Model festival include key figures in architecture, philosophy and anthropology, along with emerging thinkers. Notable names include Rotor, Carolyn Steel, Rafael Moneo and Carme Pinós.

This first edition of the festival represents a first major event ahead of the city becoming the UIA-UNESCO Word Capital of Architecture 2026.

The .barcelona domain helps you stand out on Google Maps

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A geographical domain such as .barcelona helps geolocate your project, allowing you to increase traffic to your website and improve your organic position in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). All this makes a domain such as .barcelona the best option for naturally boosting your website’s presence on the internet.

Google studies show that 80% of internet users rely on search engines to obtain local results. Organic search results with Google actually display local results, and we should bear in mind that users tend to choose one of the options which comes up in the top positions. The best example of this is Google Maps. A good position on Google Maps results in a higher ranking in Google’s organic search results.

Consequently, using a local geographical domain such as .barcelona plays a key role in facilitating access for future clients. In short, thanks to a domain such as .barcelona:

  • It’s easier to find you
  • It’s easier to remember your name
  • It’s easier to attract new visitors
  • It’s easier to sell your end product
  • Your organic positioning will improve

Check if your domain is available: domini.barcelona/registra/

The .barcelona domain as a loudhailer for local gastronomy

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Barcelona is a global leader in gastronomy and has its own identity in this sphere. One of the things which attracts tourists to the city every year is its wide array of restaurants, the variety on offer and the options for all budgets and tastes, something the city’s restaurateurs are well aware of.

Making use of a .barcelona website for a restaurant in the city offers a loudhailer and a business opportunity: the value of the Barcelona brand enjoys worldwide renown.

This is why more and more gastronomy businesses are choosing the .barcelona domain to represent them on the internet. One example is the Bao Bar, where customers can enjoy these typical Asian sandwiches with a local touch: “We chose to be part of .barcelona because it’s very important for us to position ourselves geographically in our city”, affirms Irene Lopo, from the Bao Bar.

Other important gastronomy spaces in the city using the .barcelona domain include the Moka Restaurant, La Boqueria, the iconic Sol Soler in the Gràcia neighbourhood and the Pastisseria Brunells, one of the city’s oldest cake shops.

If you want to associate your business with the .barcelona brand, you can find full information here.

Differences between a registration company and a domain re-seller

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In the online world, a domain is the name we want people to use to find us on the internet, the one we put in the address field. It needs to be unique in the world, and that’s why it needs choosing carefully before anybody else can register it.

If we want to buy a domain, we need to do so through a registration company or a domain re-seller:

·       Registration companies are authorised by the ICANN to issue domain licences. This means they can create and sell domains themselves. Some provide domains to the general public and other sell domains wholesale to re-sellers.

·       Just like registration companies, internet domain re-sellers are companies which sell domains directly to end users. The only difference is that they cannot issue the domains themselves and must buy them beforehand from a registration company. Internet domains are a product and as such can be bought and sold, and re-sellers have permission to do this.

Re-sellers tend to purchase domains in bulk and registration companies apply discounts, giving them a profit margin. In addition, many re-sellers are not simply devoted to selling, but also offer additional services such as better customer service, web hosting and web design. These services mean clients prefer them to large registration companies, where they can only buy the domain name.

Where can I register a .barcelona domain?

All you need to do to register a .barcelona domain is to click here, where you will find registration companies and re-sellers from which you can choose the option which best adapts to your domain.

Domain, website and email: how they are similar and how they differ

Posted on by Comunicació

When we talk about the internet there are some related concepts which can cause confusion between them. While plenty of people know what a domain is, some might not realise that registering one does not give you a website. People may also confuse a URL address with an email address.

What is a domain?

A domain name is simply the name we choose for our website. Technically, it is a ‘translation’ using words that are easy to remember and which correspond to an IP address where all the information on our website is hosted. This IP address is a very long unique number, which we essentially substitute with the domain name. Consequently, the domain name must also be the only one of its kind in the world. An example of a domain would be mercat.barcelona.

Does registering a domain mean we have a website?

No. If we register a domain, we have only registered what we want to call ourselves on the network (domain name). If we want a website, we must rent space where it will be housed. To do this we need to acquire space on the server where we will save all the files that make up our website. We do this through a web hosting company.

So, what is the difference between a domain and a website?

The domain is the name we write in the browser, while the website is the page itself. In other words, all the information it contains: files, texts and images.

And email?

An email address is the address we use to send and receive emails, from a webmail or an email management programme such as Outlook. This service is provided from an email server. The email address very often includes the domain name, as most web servers offer the option of registering email addresses too. This way we can manage everything from the same domain management panel.

An email address differs from a website address as it has the symbol @ in the middle. This separates the name of the recipient from the email domain. For instance, if our domain is mercat.barcelona, the email address could be info@mercat.barcelona. We can register as many email addresses as we wish or as many as our server allows.