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SSL comes to landing page tools, but at a price

by — Domain Services 2 Comments

Services that make it easy to create landing pages across multiple domains need to implement SSL.

Next month is the deadline for most sites to move to https with an SSL certificate. At that point, Google’s Chrome browser will give a “not secure” warning when someone visits a page with any type of form. This includes a WordPress blog with comments or an email sign-up form.

This causes an issue for landing page services such as Instapage and LeadPages, which allow users to quickly create landing pages with lead capture forms across multiple domains. These types of pages will show the warning in Chrome, and that warning will reduce conversion rates.

Instapage has responded by offering SSL on all of its new plans, but these plans are significantly more expensive than the old plans. Right now I pay $39 per month. The cheapest new plan is $76 when paid monthly.

As for LeadPages, there’s nothing on its home page about SSL. A customer inquiry about SSL has a number of frantic comments from customers concerned about what will happen next month.

These companies can use free SSL certificate options, but there’s a bit of technical work in the background to make this work.

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The three types of companies at WHD.usa

by — Domain Services 2 Comments

Here are the types of companies pitching to webhosts.

The show floor at WHD.usa.

I’m writing this from a familiar place for the domain industry: the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. I’m surrounded by the exhibit floor at WHD.usa, a web hosting industry conference put on by the same group that now runs NamesCon (which will be in the same hotel in January).

The majority of companies sponsoring the event fall into three buckets:

Website builders – These companies, including Duda and CM4all, offer website builders for webhosts. Domain registrars and hosts need an easy way for their customers to create websites and become sticky customers. Installing and creating a WordPress site is too technical for many users, and that’s where these companies step in. They offer white label or branded website builders that hosts/registrars offer to their customers. Most of these use a proprietary building platform, but Boldgrid is an example of one that makes it easy to start a WordPress site.

Domain reseller systems – OpenSRS and Enom have a co-branded booth this time around as they are no longer competing with each other after Tucows acquired Enom. InterNetX and Ascio also have booths. .Com registry Verisign is the headline sponsor.

Backup and security – This is a big area. There are spam filtering companies, backup protection, security systems and more. Some of these companies sell directly to end users and others offer their services to hosting companies that, in turn, offer them to their hosting customers.

Of course, these are just the sponsors. Attendees include companies all around the hosting ecosystem including the hosts themselves.

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Topcoin plans ICO with goal of being loyalty program for digital goods

by — Domain Services 17 Comments

Company plans to use blockchain to disrupt the loyalty program business.

If you’ve registered domain names at Uniregistry over the past three years then you are familiar with Topcoin, a form of digital rewards that can be redeemed for discounts on purchases at Uniregistry. The utility of this rewards currency is about to get interesting.

Michael Blend launched TopCoin at the end of 2014 with the idea of it being a loyalty program for digital goods like domain names and hosting. Topcoin was built on blockchain, but keep in mind that this was well before the current cryptocurrency craze.

Now, in the midst of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and a run up in the value of cryptocurrencies, Topcoin is getting ready to go big.

The company, with .build founder George Minardos as CEO, is planning its ICO and will use much of the proceeds to build out Topcoin as an easy-to-use loyalty program for digital goods. It essentially lets companies create a loyalty program for free that’s based on blockchain. This was the original idea for Topcoin, but it makes a lot more sense to people now than it did back in 2014 and will finally have the infrastructure to push forward.

I recently spoke with Minardos about the company’s plans to understand how it will work and what it will mean for domain investors who own Topcoin. Click here to continue reading…

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Afilias gets patent related to community top level domains

by — Domain Services 0 Comments

Patent describes way to verify registrant information to create trust and community.

An explanatory graphic from Afilias’ patent.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted patent 9,747,378 (pdf) to Afilias this week for “Linked web presence pages associated with a top level domain”.

I was a bit confused about what the patent covered and if the technology behind it had been implemented, so I reached out to Afilias for an explanation. Its explanation is a better description of the patent than I could come up with:

US Patent 9747378 stemmed from work by Afilias on a way to support the ability of community oriented TLDs to help the registrants gain exposure and interaction. Specifically, the patent addresses two important aspects of community building. The first is to add credibility that a particular registrant and domain name is a bonafide participant in the community.

It does this by cross checking various public sources of data against the registrant’s information and verifying the match. A proper match elevates the profile of a registrant and their domain name and gives other members of the community more confidence in dealing with them.The second is to enable the registrant to self-add functionality to their web presence by enabling things like: accepting donations, offering chat service, posting a twitter feed, allowing comments, and providing customer service.

Afilias says the concept is a result of Afilias’ support of various community-oriented TLDs, although none have specifically deployed the capability at this time.

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Snappa makes creating social media graphics easy

by — Domain Services 0 Comments

I learned about Snappa because of its domain purchase and recently became a paying customer.

Snappa helps you create social media (and other) graphics.

Back in May I interviewed Christopher Gimmer, co-founder of a graphics site called Snappa. His company paid $40,000 to upgrade its domain name from Snappa.io to Snappa.com.

I was interested because of the domain story. But a couple months ago I needed to create some video thumbnails for YouTube and didn’t have the skills to do it. I tried a few apps that popped up when I searched Google for “Create YouTube Thumbnails”. They were all rather tricky to figure out. I remembered Snappa from the interview and decided to check it out.

It turns out Snappa is the perfect solution for the graphically-challenged (like me).

Snappa offers templates and an easy editor for creating graphics. It’s super simple, with preset sizes for YouTube Thumbnails, Facebook covers, Twitter posts and more. In a minute or two, you can upgrade all of your social media graphics.

I also think the way Snappa gated its subscription option was brilliant. You can use the service for free but will start to discover limitations when you use it more than a few times.

First you can create and download graphics but not save them. Then you hit a download limit. At that point, you see the value and pay for a subscription. In my case, that’s $15 a month, which is very reasonable if I create just a few graphics per month.

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