Yesterday I had a request to set up some hosting by a friend of mine. He does some small web design projects for local businesses and regularly asks for a small dollop of space to host the sites.

Once in a while you come across a great example of someone not understanding how the web works, and when he told me the domain that this newest client wanted to host, I couldn’t help but cringe at the address they’d picked.

The domain starts http://www.a12one … (I’ll leave the rest out to spare their identity), and despite my friend’s explanations that the logic was faulted, the client had come to believe that, because it starts with ‘a1’, it will appear at the top of Google searches.

Ah if only. I think you would find if that we’re the case. Being A A J Higgs it would have tangible advantages for me. Needless to say, I can’t really see it happening, although it would be quite amusing soul destroying to have to press the ‘o’ in Gooooooooooooogle approximately 24 billion times to get somewhere near the Zs pages. Poor Xerox, Yellow Pages and Zoo Magazine; they wouldn’t fare well.

As an additional punch to the groin, I have a feeling that mixing letters with numbers might cause a migraine like headache when recalling the aforementioned address. It could only have been ‘improved’ upon by inserting hypens at every available opportunity.