NameDriver

Hi guys,

We are aware that, while parking brings in revenue on a day to day basis, many of you are looking to sell domains while maintaining your legal rights to the domains. We feel it is our responsibility to ensure that you have maximum control over your domains, so we continue to look at how best to meet these needs.
Listening to customer feedback is one of the things we do best and have developed a new set of features focusing on these two aspects. Here is a rundown of how they work:

The new features can be found on the user options page.
Login ---> My Account ---> User Options

If you scroll down, you will see two new options:
Interface options
Parking options

The interface option allows you to set your default language for the homepage, auto mails etc. I presume most of you will leave it on English, but you can also choose German and Polish (soon a couple more Euro languages on the way).

The parking options is where it gets tasty. You have:
- Custom For Sale Link URL
- Custom For Sale Link Text
- Impressum Link
- Limit Impressum to .de tld
- Catch All?
- Use Ad Provider RS?
- Use User Searches?

The Custom For Sale Link URL is something which we have offered on a manual basis for some time. You can direct any sales enquiries to a specific page you have set up. Please use http etc. So http://www.mydomains.com . This can also be used to direct sales enquiries to a specific domain on your sales page, such as http://www.mydomains.com/specificdomain.com . The form for this is to enter [domain_name] in the link. So in my example, it would be http://www.mydomains.com/[domain_name].

The Custom For Sale Link Text is simply the text which appears on the page. This does not require you to set a custom for sale link. If you would rather have "Buy this domain" instead of "Enquire about this domain", you can now enter this text.
Please note that the custom text will only appear in the language you enter it in . If you have multiple language domains, we recommend leaving this blank as we have the standard link translated into 16 languages.

For the above two options, the links will only be visible if the domains are set as "For Sale". If you have the domains on "Contact", then the link will continue to be "Contact the owner".

The next two options are really for our German clients. Impressum and Impressum de TLD. In Germany, it is a legal requirement that you have an Impressum on your pages. This is a link on the page showing who owns and runs the site. Many of our German clients have asked for this. The link allows you to link to an outside page which acts as your impressum. The limit to de TLD means that this will only show up on your domains in Germany.

The Above four options are all on an approval basis - i.e. they will only be set to Live once we have approved them, so please make your suggestions as suitable as possible to ensure they can be approved quickly.

The last three options focus on how the parking page works. In the majority of cases, we recommend that you leave these on the default settings (Yes) unless you have a clear reason not to want these things to happen.
These three options are available on an account-wide basis and a per domain basis. You can change them on individual domains on the domain settings page.

The Catch All option means that you catch all traffic to your domain, including sub domains and index pages. e.g. news.mydomain.com and mydomain.com/news. Some users have requested the option to turn this off so the ONLY traffic arriving on your domain is the traffic on www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com. Any other traffic is dropped. This option will almost certainly lead to a drop in traffic, so we suggest leaving it on "Yes".

Use Ad Provider RS refers to what happens once someone makes a search on your domain. If someone searches for "cars" on the domain, then Google will return some related searches (RS) to do with cars. Again, there have been demands to turn these off, so we offer this option, but we again recommend to leave the default settings as they are.

Use User Searches relates to the updating of your related searches depending on what users are searching for on the page. If someone comes to your page and searches for "Cars", then this will appear as a related search the next time someone comes to your page. This can be tricky when people search for trademark terms on your pages, so you have the option to turn this off. Remember that you also have the option to switch off individual user searches at the bottom of the domain settings page.
The updating of user searches does lead to significant increases in CTR, so we'd recommend leaving this on as usual.

We also offer several No RS templates which turn off the related searches altogether. This is another option to control what happens on your domain.

Sorry for the essay-sized post, but it is important to break this all down for you. While we continue to innovate on the parking and sales side of things, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that there are other factors involved in domain parking. These options hopefully go some way to ensuring we leave no stone unturned.

We'd certainly appreciate any feedback, so let us know what you think.

Mister Blogs will be posting this message with screenshots later on today just in case anything is unclear, so keep an eye on him. http://blog.namedrive.com/

Ed

__________________
Email: Craig@namedrive.com

retired_member15

Nice one Ed!

tifosi

Thanks Ed. A few there I've asked for.

S