The DomainFace Blog

This blog post is quite overdue, as we officially opened the doors to the latest incarnation of our service on the 15th of December (2010) and it’s now the 18th!

It wasn’t the smoothest of launches, but despite a delay getting the doors open and some issues with our mailouts, the system has been holding up very well and despite a hammering by users, there have been very few technical problems and the occasional errors experienced by users have been few and far between! It took us a while to get the doors opened, but I think, all in all, the time spent getting our systems working well was worth it. It’s important to get your product released as soon as you can, but too early and you risk losing customers due to too many errors and bugs.

On a side note, people who purchased early have qualified for a bonus webinar with Kenny and myself, as well as access to a recording of one of Kenny’s presentations at a seminar he spoke at recently. We’ll be doing a mailout in the next couple of days with the link to the recording, but the webinar may end up waiting until early January, as due to the time of year, many people may not be able to attend. Early January is very close though, so it’s not very long to wait!

Where we’re at with Domainface and where we’re going

This is our first release of the new phase of Domainface, so you should expect it really fill out over time. What you see is most definitely only the beginning of where we’re going. Right now we have 3 main areas of functionality inside Domainface, which are:

• Searching for domain names
• Portfolio management
• Automated bidding

Searching

The search facility is holding up nicely; we spent nearly all of 2010 getting this working really fast and reliably. Most of the technical issues we’ve had have come and gone well before now, meaning the volume and speed of retrieval of the search results has had a great chance to mature before we opened the doors to Domainface Pro.

Despite this, we have a lot more domain sources we’d like to add to fill out our results and still more metrics to add to the system, not to mention additional ways to search yet to come, not the least of which is out dictionary and keyword search features. We also have some very ambitious plans for what we’re planning on doing with our database which will make what we’re offering now look very small in comparison to what will be possible if we can successfully pull off what we’re planning. I won’t get into that much though until we have something more to show.

On the user interface side of things, the search facility works well enough, but we want to really improve the results display, which means a good amount of time is going to be invested in developing a new results grid that fits into smaller spaces and that we can reuse in other areas of the site, such as domain favourites and the portfolio section.

Portfolio Management

What you see in the portfolio section, right now, is barely a scratch on the surface of some of the ideas we have. I think of it almost as a placeholder for what’s to come, relatively speaking. We’re looking to make it possible to store a lot of your own data against each domain in your portfolio so that it’s very easy to go to one place to discover important details such as expiry dates, FTP login details for your domains and so forth. If you have ideas about this, please let us know at our community support site.

Automated Bidding

As of this post, you can only see NameJet as an option for automated bidding, but what you may not know is that our SnapNames automated bidding add-on is essentially completed and is undergoing testing right now, so you’ll see that shortly. Our add-on for Pool.com bidding is about 95% complete and will begin testing shortly, so that will come soon after. Development on our GoDaddy and Sedo bidding add-ons is about to begin, so expect those in the not too distant future as well.

Once we have NameJet, SnapNames and Pool.com autobidding all running live, we’re going to release our “triple barrel backorder” feature, which will let you, with one click, set up your bidding on pending delete domains at all three of these sites at the same time to drastically increase your chances that you’ll actually win that domain you want. Take a look at Kenny’s report on domaining for more information on the triple barrel backorder strategy.

What Now?

Get in there and find the gems in Domainface! I’ll be posting on this blog whenever we add anything to Domainface, or have any fixes and updates to report on, so make sure you’re subscribed to the RSS feed. Lastly, we know many of you have (or will have) feedback, whether praise, complaints (we hope not!), questions or suggestions, so please post them at our community support site and look through other people’s suggestions too, so you can vote on the requests you like, which will help bring those requests to our attention.

posted by Nathan Ridley.