Friday 6 August 2010

A rather unfortunate coincidence.

Further to yesterday's post regarding domain names, I've been having a discussion on the zazzle forum with some fellow zazzlers ragarding domain names, the pros and cons of .com vs .net or .biz, of hyphenating the name or adding to it, and cautions in actually choosing the name. Someone cautioned me to take care that the word or letter combinations that I chose couldn't be misconstrued and lead to x-rated websites appearing in search results beside my own. I did a search on google with the 'safe search' turned off and there at the bottom of page 2 of the results was an 'adult' site. I clicked on it to be sure and was thankfull that the page had a warning and a requirement to 'proceed' or 'cancel' before anything was shown, but it really wasn't a nice thing to find.

I'm quite naive I guess. To me, to my mind, Animatastic is nothing more than a play on "Fantastic Animals" and that seemed perfect for a store filled with cute, family friendly cartoon animal designs. BUT, on the same day, yet another zazzler pointed out to me that when they went to a Squidoo lens I have (a semi-promotional article for the store) one of the google adsense ads at the very bottom of the page was for another x-rated website! I'm really disgusted that google allow x-rated websites on adsense AND that squidoo can't filter the ads that google place on their website to be U or G rated.

Before I set up the store and chose the name, I did do a google search on it and all of the results I saw were actually related to animation and anime not animals. Google actually suggested that I meant to type animEtastic not animAtastc, and I didn't see any x-rated links on the first few pages with either spelling. Doing the search now, I pretty much take up the first three pages of results on google, but haven't tried any other search engines yet.

I'm stuck with the zazzle username and url, but with a lot of effort I *could* rename and rebrand the store, website, blogs, facebook fanpage and everything else I've done promotion-wise. I can buy a domain for the new chosen store name and have that direct to my zazzle store and/or website. It would all be a HUGE effort and I'm sure I'd lose some promotions and sales in the meantime, but I don't want to lose any customers or offend anyone because some sick porno site appeared close to me in the search results.

Why don't search providers make the DEFAULT search parameters a universal rating rather than make us go into advanced search settings to change to 'safe search'?

What do YOU think of when you hear the name Animatastic? Do you think it's appropriate for a family friendly store? The riskiest designs I have are in the BIG Kids range:

Trousers Snake T-shirt shirt
Trousers Snake T-shirt by Animatastic
Shop for a t-shirt on zazzle



AND


Sexy Chick - Cool & Fun Ladies T-shirt shirt
Browse other Sexy T-Shirts

Those are the only two designs I have that made me create the BIG Kids category, everything else would happily fit in a general category by animal type. I don't think there is anything wrong with either design but I thought some parents may not appreciate having to explain "Trouser Snake" and the other designs in the category just aren't things that would appeal to kids - 'chick virtues' positive affirmation products aimed at women for example. The category thumbnail is this design below as I deliberately didn't want 'trouser snake' or 'sexy chick' appearing on the frontpage of the store.


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