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Document: WM-009 P. Webb
Category: Project 2017.04.11
BeachfrontDigital — April Update
Abstract
Eliminating friction and adding new features to BeachfrontDigital.
Body
Who knew analytics could be fun?
I've spent the past week and a half working on the new
BeachfrontDigital[1] and I'm loving it. After publishing my previous
post[2], I thought about how I could make BD more useful to myself
and other people. Something that bothered me for awhile was the lack
of importing. *To be quite honest*, I was scared of the work required
to make importing domains work. I just didn't want to deal with it.
*Lame*, right?
Here's a reminder of why nobody bothered to sign up for V1
of BeachfrontDigital:
- I wasn't offering anything that a spreadsheet couldn't handle.
- $6/year was still too much to charge for someone who has
<10 domains.
- To make charging for my service palatable, I'd need to create a
sync system for registrars.
- Not all registrars have public APIs (see: Hover).
- There are *so* many registrars. It's not cost-effective to
maintain syncing for each.
- Creating a sync system based on undocumented APIs like some
people have done with Hover is a *terrible* idea. Undocumented
APIs means they can break at *any* moment.
This reminder was enough to get me back into making BD better,
starting with CSV importing and guess what? It wasn't *that* bad! I
think it took me two days to get importing to work, with another two
for optimization. When a user decides to export their data, it'll
look something like this:
📸[Snippet of my domain export from BeachfrontDigital][IMG1]
1. Eliminating friction
During a coding break, I read an article that was sitting in a tab
for at least a week, "Amazon's Friction-Killing Tactics To Make
Products More Seamless"[3]. What an eye-opener that was! The
takeaway I got from it was to *minimize as much friction as
possible for the end user*. It was easy to identify a major point
of friction with BD as it was something I was actually dreading.
Me, the guy who made the product, didn't want to perform the basic
task. Why? It was too much work!
In V1 of BeachfrontDigital, I had to input the domain name,
registrar, price, AND expiration for every single domain I own.
Even if the number of domains I had were two, that's *still* more
work than I'm willing to do. No one likes filling out
spreadsheets, it's a chore. What to do? Automate the hell outta
what we don't want to deal with!
Of course, you'll have to input your domains because BD is not a
mind-reading app (it *would be* in a few years if it was a Google
product). Thankfully, BD will run a WHOIS search in the background
and automatically grab registrar and expiration info. Pricing is
something you'll have to input as well because registrars don't
have the same pricing for domains/top-level domains (TLDs).
📸[Screenshot of my domain portfolio][IMG2]
Don't even get me started on how inconsistent TLD operators are
with listing registrar names. In my testing, I found three
variations[4] of the business name for Tucows. Like, why? Lucky
for you, I asked customer support at both Tucows and Hover and was
told this:
> The variations in the Tucows name for different domains is
> simply how it was inputted at the Registry level (each domain
> extension or tld has a governing entity known as a Registry),
> and since that is a human's job normally, it gets added to their
> system slightly different each time.
>
> — Jordan Q
In addition, domains purchased through Hover will list the
registrar in WHOIS searches as Tucows. Gandi will show EPAG
Domainservices GmbH, iwantmyname will show 1API GmbH, and so on.
It would be *ideal* to show the actual reseller you purchased your
domains from but that's not how WHOIS works. Oh well.
2. New features
📸[Portfolio dashboard for BeachfrontDigital][IMG3]
This is how the new portfolio dashboard looks! I figured that it'd
be good to show personal analytics in both textual and graphical
formats. While creating this, I learned how flexible and awesome
Handlebars[5] is.
At a glance, you can see how many domain renewals are occurring
this month, this year, and next year. January and July are busy
months for me. Interesting that they are six months apart. What is
it about those months that give me ideas? I just realized I
haven't accounted for people who renew domains for multiple years…
*updates list of TODOs*.
You can also see how many domains you own per registrar.
Obviously, I favor Tucows because I like the included WHOIS
privacy from Hover, for domains that support it (I don't get why
`.fm` and `.io` don't, so dumb). I purchased `frsh.fm` from Gandi
initially, but then moved it to Hover. Not sure why EPAG
Domainservices GmbH is there…
Finally, you also get to see how many domains you have per TLD.
`.com` and `.online` are my favorite ones, apparently. The legend
for this chart is awfully busy, I'll need to find a way to make it
look better. I mean, someone with 50+ TLDs in their domain
portfolio might be an edge-case, but it's going to bother me until
I find a solution, haha. 🤷🏾♂️
In order to make every data point stand out, you need color. Well,
I wasn't going to manually create colors, these are all generated
dynamically! I need to do a bit of tweaking here and there but I'm
mostly satisfied with the results.
In conclusion
At the end of my previous post[2] about BeachfrontDigital, I
mentioned making the service free. Hmm, *nope*. However, it *will*
be free during beta, which is whenever I launch V2 until I deem
the service is ready for primetime. That could be as early as this
summer or as late as 2018. At that point, BeachfrontDigital will
cost $11/year afterwards.
What you've seen above is only half of the first wave of upgrades.
My next BD post will most likely show more charts, but centered
around pricing! I'm also thinking about making each of the charts
fullscreen-capable. It would be neat to use the left/right arrow
keys to look at the other charts in fullscreen mode as well! 🕸
References
[1] <https://beachfront.digital>
[2] </WM-007>
[3] <https://firstround.com/review/amazons-friction-killing-tactics-to-make-products-more-seamless>
[4] <https://twitter.com/BeachfrontD/status/848404426557673472>
[5] <https://handlebarsjs.com>
[IMG1] <https://🔥.pixels.wtf/blog/image/2017/beachfront-digital-april-update-a.png>
[IMG2] <https://🔥.pixels.wtf/blog/image/2017/beachfront-digital-april-update-b.jpg>
[IMG3] <https://🔥.pixels.wtf/blog/image/2017/beachfront-digital-april-update-c.jpg>
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