Here at DomainTools we are in the midst of a major site redesign project and we wanted to share the beginnings of the new and improved “DomainTools” site with you starting today.

The first item most readers of this blog will notice is the new login screen. This necessary, but usually blase page, received a serious renovation, with a lot of thought on the small details that help you quickly find your way past the login and on to the parts of the site you care most about – the product and services and your account.

New users will also find a greatly-improved process of setting up a new account. Visitors will find improved explanations of membership levels, inline product descriptions, and a clear, discrete flow from decision to sign-up.

The biggest change is our member’s new home page. The old home page was certainly colorful, but it wasn’t all that helpful except to exercise your scroll-wheel finger. Rather than display the majority of account details on a single page, the new member account page is tabular and organized by related items carefully constructed to keep things on one page for most resolutions. Simply tab to the section you’re interested in to drill down to further details, make changes to your account, and review historical information. You’ll also find a new section under the “Messages” tab that will let us send important information and updates to our customers directly. A red flag will indicate when a new message is available to review. Watch for updates to DomainTools in this section!

We realized early in the design phase of this remodel that two items were critically important: improve performance AND user-experience for our customers. A few of the performance improvements implemented were detailed in an earlier post and we continue our efforts in that area as well. When delving into the user-experience modifications, we identified a need to provide customers easy access to information. There now exists a dedicated panel always visible in the My Account section with a simple, clear list and direct path to services used and reports ordered.

Stay tuned for more upgrades that will bring our customers systems that are easier to use, exciting new products and services and lots of performance enhancements.

Our apologies, but this pun was simply too good to pass up: the Domain Roundtable extended auction is now Larger(.com) than ever! We’ve added more than a hundred domains to a catalog that now contains over 275 choice domains, including Larger.com, DesignerCases.com, Tvo.com, Moon.travel and more.

Quite a few already have bids and interest is building around many that we’ve just listed. You can bid now until Tuesday, June 23 at 5:00pm EST when we’ll start closing the lots.

ICA Auction Event to Support Advocacy Efforts

Aftermarket.com is pleased to announce that a portion of the Aftermarket.com event will be set aside to auction domains to benefit the ICA in advocacy efforts. If you are not aware of ICA (The Internet Commerce Association) they are a trade group comprised of members who own, develop and operate domain names for the purposes of online commerce and are a leading voice for domain owners ensuring their rights are not affected by the politics of Washington or the policies of ICANN. For additional information, please visit the ICA website.

These names have been generously donated to ICA and it would be great to see the generosity returned in kind for a worthy cause. Among the names donated that will be auctioned live during the event are:

• ParkingShare.com
• SecureWeb.com
• Deployed.com
• PayoffBills.com

The star billing of this portion of the show should definitely go to: Castaway.com. Estimated value is quite high and someone is sure to get an ‘A-Player’ name for their portfolio.

We will also feature the following names in our extended event:

• Slices.org
• LikeHer.net
• SleepSafe.com
• HolidayLoan.com
• PlasticSurgeryWebsite.com

Participate in-person on June 16th at Domain Roundtable 2009 or create a complimentary DomainTools account and become eligible to bid today.

With great domains and the opportunity to give back to ICA you won’t want to miss the action.

Domain Roundtable Extended Auction is Released!

Do to the overwhelming numbers of quality submissions for Domain Roundtable 2009, we have secured ’special earmarks’ to present this extended auction catalog. The auction is open for bidding – NOW. The path to your personal stimulus plan can start today!

The complete data used for analysis is and selection for these domains is available for the extended auction list and available for download. The data is used as a reference, is not guaranteed by selection committee.

Domain Roundtable Live Auction is Released!

The domain selection for the Aftermarket.com Domain Roundtable 2009 Auction session is wrapping up. The quantity of quality domains submitted at competitive pricing for the auction was impressive. Thought Convergence elected to work with the DomainConsultant team again in this endeavor assisting with the review analysis and selection.

It has taken an act of Congress, but we are proud to announce the list of domains selected for the DRT 2009 Live Auction. The auction is open for early bidding – NOW.

The selection committee used a variety of data statistics and online tools to determine value and interest in each name. Using Estibot to gain an appraisal evaluation was great assistance. A full data used is available on the live auction list available for download. The data is used as a reference, is not guaranteed by selection committee.

The Live Auction initiates June 16 at 4:00pm EDT. Participation in the auction is available onsite or online. Onsite registration is available at the Thought Convergence booth. Please stop by, we will be happy to assist you in registering. If you are not able to join us, you can participate in the simultaneous online auction. Be sure to preregister at www.Aftermarket.com.

The auction will start with domains donated to Internet Commerce Association. All proceeds of these sales will go directly to ICA. Stay tuned for that list!

Aftermarket.com elected to conduct a Live auction and Extended auction with names targeted specifically for each auction catalog. Details on the Extended auction are still in committee, but we expect a resolution soon. Domains not sold in Live auction will be available in Extended auction for purchase.

The Domain Roundtable conference is hosted in Washington, DC, June 14 -16. The conference agenda contains unique panels and panelists covering a wide range of information, appealing to and gathering a vast audience. Conference details, agenda, speakers and registration information can be found at the Domain Roundtable conference website.

Stay tuned for the ICA and Extended auction update!

Domain Name Wire recently posted several shortcut techniques to using some of the most popular DomainTools services. The post was timely, we at DomainTools have taken great measures and made significant strides to improve speed and performance of the site itself for our customers around the world.

The single greatest improvement was the implementation of a CDN (content delivery network). We tested the performance of several CDN’s and we found Akami offered the best results. They have the largest international distributed network that helps us extend the performance benefits to our entire worldwide customer base. We completed changes to the DomainTools site to fully utilize Akami’s CDN and rolled out the changes a few weeks ago.

DomainTools also started using the Google Javascript CDN for common Ajax libraries. There is a rapidly-growing number of sites using the Google CDN for JS libraries. By using this with DomainTools, we increase the chance that our customers already have a cached copy of the libraries on their computer. This has helped boost page load and responsiveness on the DomainTools site.

Our international customers will likely notice the greatest increase in speed. However, even from my house located less than five miles from the DomainTools data center in Washington State, the number of hops were cut in half and the speed tripled. I was going through 17 hops to California, then up to Canada and back to Washington, a circuitous route that averaged six seconds – now, it’s closer to two seconds. On average, the site load improved over 200%.

See below for a sample of the performance improvements listed in seconds, “Pre” or “Post” site enhancements.

As if that wasn’t’ enough, the development and engineering team has been tirelessly optimizing the internal code base, server infrastructure and network topology. These changes, and many others we have in the works, will continue to improve the response times on DomainTools. We have even extended the changes to the Aftermarket.com live auction platform. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to enhance the service and performance of DomainTools for all our customers – domestic and international.

Domain Roundtable

This year’s show is shaping up to be an exciting one! In addition to the knowledgeable speakers, we’ll have sessions covering topics such as:

• domain valuation
• technology trends
• alternative monetization
• legal policies
• online tools

Discount Registration is only available for a few more days! Register by May 15th online and pay only $895; registration increases to $995 on May 16th. We’ve come up with 5 great reasons why you should attend Domain Roundtable:

1) You need to know what your domains are worth in order to get top dollar for them
2) Industry experts will brief you on all issues and policies facing the industry
3) We’ll provide information on all domain monetization options
4) There will be opportunities to network with industry insiders, as well as, influential people in related industries
5) All the cool kids will be there!

Be sure to submit your domains for the Aftermarket.com auction taking place on June 16th. Submission deadline is May 31, 2009.

Check out the Domain Roundtable site to register – now while discount is still available. It is easy to follow DRT on all the latest progress on Twitter or Facebook! We made it easy for you to not miss a beat.

The GEO-Domain Auction is heading into its last day with a full head of geo-steam and a pocket full of bidders – final auction begins Tuesday, May 5, at 12pm PDT and ends when all the lots are closed and the deals are gone.

Here is the latest news:

Fresh GEO’s
A few names had to be removed due to conflicts with other ongoing auctions – regrettable of course but prudent nonetheless. So we’ve added some stellar replacements while other sellers have approached us to include their inventory as well. Additions include:

The full inventory with data, valuations and comments is available for download.

Reserve.com Bidding at $12,000
We expect many more bids for this premium with uses in tickets, travel, hunting, money, military and beyond – a true premium generic without the premium price tag. Don’t miss this chance to grab it cheap, valued at $500,000 by DomainConsultant. Over 30 bids so far.

Domain Madness Winner!
It took some extra time, given the complexity of the scoring system, but we have found a winner – a domainer who beat all the other domainers in guessing the results of the auction.

The winner is to be announced tomorrow during the auction starting at 12pm PDT.

Bidding in action
Bidders can enter their ‘proxy’ bids up to that time after which they can only bid on individual names as they come up. Usual auction format will be used — going once, going twice, last call and sold. Once virtual gavel drops, it is sold and lot is closed.

Head to the auction page to bid – GeoDomain Auction.

Big thanks again to all who have helped and supported and been there for us. We love you all! Yeah, I said it!

DomainConsultant.com

Of course, we understand that standard Extended Protocol is to lock up anything even mildly good in our inventory, announce it ten weeks in advance and then let them rot in a bargain bin while domainers pick away.

No thanks – we’ll sling out Reserve.com at ‘No Reserve’ instead. And you thought Ad.com was a deal? Or how about owning the whole country for far less?

Truth is we decided to release our full inventory in three phases – giving us the ability to promote and market each name, in each phase accordingly. All names are given 100% due effort, each one gets its moment in the sun – from A to Twitter.

And during each phase, any and all remaining names are given fresh eyes, perhaps fresh interest from someone who missed the small, live window.

And so we are happy to break protocol (again) and announce that we have indeed saved or ‘reserved‘ the best names for last: one-of-a-kind Reserve.com

So first came the Catalog, then the Showcase, now our soon-to-be-famous or infamous Featured GEO-Domains (22) – including six new cities and a slew of other No Reserve generics:

The above generics are now available for bids along with other stellar inventory including SantaClarita.com, Mundo.com, Miss.com, Augsburg.com, Longhorn.com and more. Many have bids already and will sell.

Open lots will begin to close at 12pm PDT on May 5th in alphabetical order – get your proxy bids in now and then join us for the conclusion of our GEO-a-thon. Bid NOW at the GeoDomain Auction online!

Have you ever wanted to own your own city? You’ll need the domain name, of course, so what better place to start than these city domains? There are still 30 premium GEO-Domains available for extended bidding in the GEO-Domain Auction until May 5th – a few already have bids, which means they will sell to someone else unless you act quickly.

Anyone who attended the terrific GEO-Domain EXPO in San Diego understands a great city domain is a safe harbor – an excellent platform for growth and a reliable steward of resale value. Unlike technology names with terms like “MP3″, a city domain never goes out of style. The market for relevant traffic to the domain includes just about anyone in the city itself and those looking to travel to the city or do business there. When it’s time to resell the domain, the buyer pool is equally expansive.

There’s also some great bargins under $3500 including FranceHoliday.com ($3450), AmericanGuide.com ($1500), PortlandVacation.com ($2800), iSouthKorea.com ($1500), and Albuquerque.us ($3500).

Bid now and join us May 5 at 12pm PDT as we close each lot in alphabetical order. Additional domain information, including an interactive map, is available here.

Available City Domains Include:

Augsburg.com
$15,000
Population 270,000

Albuquerque.us
$3500
Population 500,000, Top 50 U.S. City
Bargain price .us

BeachHaven.com
$14,000
NJ/Long Island Shore.
Median home value over $600,000

BocaRatonFlorida.com
$9000
100,000 residents, $500,000 median home price

Elizabeth.net
$9950
City in New Jersey with over 200,000
Obviously a name, too.

KansasCity.us
$5000
Comparables includes Nashville.us $23,000, Miami.us $15,000
Population 500,000 in bigger or two K.S.

Ponce.com
$21,000
Huge city in Southern Puerto Rico

SantaClarita.com
$35,000
Population 200,000, $500,000 home median
Applies to the city and the valley – home to Six Flags. Cheap!

TempeArizona.com
$9000
Great domain for a city of 200,000
Home to Arizona State and just a few miles from Phoenix

Washington.biz
$4500
Population 6.5 million in the state
Name, city, state, brandable, SEO, resale = inexpensive