Where has phi been?
Well, I was going to post lots more, but then I got busy writing code and doing design etc.
Anyway, the results are I have much more to talk about so, in theory this is a win right?
New things on the simplename front include the shiny new design, so very rounded-corners and green. To be honest I'm not sure I prefer it when you combine everything including elegance. The old design required 3 files to download, the page, the CSS and one primary image. The new one has..like..10 images alone. Still, there is a price to be paid for aesthetics.
The main motivator was simply that I observed I was losing a fair number of people on the first page. I felt a more polished, more spacious look would help encourage people to look around further.
Currently, users spend 1m23s on the site on average, and look at 3 pages (typically index, features and faq). It'll be interesting to see if that picks up.
I don't actually believe I'll convince more people to buy due to the new look, but I needed more space on the main page for the suggest feature and future things, and much of the content needed reworking so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I'll probably look at an iterative redesign in another month or two.
Shiny new features include the suggestion wizard that lets you combine one or two sets of words into a bunch of domains, and then does an availability check for you - hopefully making it easier to brainstorm that new domain name.
Not quite so recent but still unannounced here, are the URL and Email forwarding services. The URL forwarding service is interesting in that it allows you to enter, say, your livejournal username and it will redirect the domain to your main livejournal page without having to go and find the URL yourself. Of course, you can enter any other url if you want, but this seemed like a nice touch and let me name-drop a bit.
Did a post to nz2.0 asking whether people had any ideas for stuff they wanted in an API yesterday afternoon. Hint for marketers to geeks - It seems that posting a link to a mailing list on a friday afternoon attracts immediate attention. I presume everyones just sitting there waiting for 5pm refreshing their email window :)
Got a couple of good suggestions back, one of which I liked so much I implemented it immediately. More on that next release :)
I'm always open to ideas btw, so if anyone reading this thinks "I wish my registrar would do X", flick me an email - richard@simplename.co.nz, it could well end up on simplename.
Anyway, the results are I have much more to talk about so, in theory this is a win right?
New things on the simplename front include the shiny new design, so very rounded-corners and green. To be honest I'm not sure I prefer it when you combine everything including elegance. The old design required 3 files to download, the page, the CSS and one primary image. The new one has..like..10 images alone. Still, there is a price to be paid for aesthetics.
The main motivator was simply that I observed I was losing a fair number of people on the first page. I felt a more polished, more spacious look would help encourage people to look around further.
Currently, users spend 1m23s on the site on average, and look at 3 pages (typically index, features and faq). It'll be interesting to see if that picks up.
I don't actually believe I'll convince more people to buy due to the new look, but I needed more space on the main page for the suggest feature and future things, and much of the content needed reworking so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I'll probably look at an iterative redesign in another month or two.
Shiny new features include the suggestion wizard that lets you combine one or two sets of words into a bunch of domains, and then does an availability check for you - hopefully making it easier to brainstorm that new domain name.
Not quite so recent but still unannounced here, are the URL and Email forwarding services. The URL forwarding service is interesting in that it allows you to enter, say, your livejournal username and it will redirect the domain to your main livejournal page without having to go and find the URL yourself. Of course, you can enter any other url if you want, but this seemed like a nice touch and let me name-drop a bit.
Did a post to nz2.0 asking whether people had any ideas for stuff they wanted in an API yesterday afternoon. Hint for marketers to geeks - It seems that posting a link to a mailing list on a friday afternoon attracts immediate attention. I presume everyones just sitting there waiting for 5pm refreshing their email window :)
Got a couple of good suggestions back, one of which I liked so much I implemented it immediately. More on that next release :)
I'm always open to ideas btw, so if anyone reading this thinks "I wish my registrar would do X", flick me an email - richard@simplename.co.nz, it could well end up on simplename.
posted by PhiRatE at
12:22 PM
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