I’ve seen a number of comments on my blog and other places criticizing Snapnames for not providing the auction history for bidders prior to 2007. According to the company, in June of 2005, Snapnames limited a person’s order history to 24 months prior to the date the look-up was being performed.

As a result of this order history truncation, many people have complained that they couldn’t gain access to their order histories to compare them to the rebate emails sent to many Snap customers on Friday.

As of this evening, I have been informed that the staff at Snapnames has adjusted the  system so order and bid histories are available back to August 2004, when auctioning began with the company. I have checked my auction history (dating back to 2006), and it appears that everything is there, although I have participated in less than 125 total auctions.

You will now be able to review all auctions in which you participated to cross-check the rebate offer with your results. You can also get an idea of the number of auctions of yours in which “halvarez” participated – both auctions that you won and lost (possibly even to “halvarez.”) I appreciate the transparency, and when I fully inspect the history sometime soon, I hope I don’t find  any domain auctions in which I lost to “halvarez” where I really wanted the name.

I also want to take a second to say that there are a number of good people who work for Snapnames and Oversee.net who probably had absolutely nothing to do with any of this mess. Keep this in mind if you need to speak with anyone at the company. I worked in AIG’s Accident Insurance direct marketing group before the meltdown, and I know that many of my former colleagues were treated poorly simply because they worked for the company, despite the fact that they had absolutely nothing to do with the company’s problems. While you might have every right to be pissed at the company and certain individuals at the company, there are plenty of good people who work there too, and this is tough on them as well.

It’s a beautiful (but cold) Saturday in New York City, and I want to head out, so I will keep this post brief. Before you develop a domain name into a website, you should map out your 3, 6, and 12 month plan for the site. I didn’t do this on a few of my websites, and I am regretting it.

With my geodomain names, I did not build them on a content management system (CMS) like Wordpress or Joomla. I didn’t have the expertise and didn’t ask the right questions. I gave direction like I knew exactly what I wanted, and I got exactly what I asked to have built. Basically every time I want to add a page of content, I need to do it in Dreamweaver and then make a few tweaks on other related pages, sitemap, home page…etc. With a CMS like Wordpress, it would be automatic. Instead of taking 15 minutes to post an article (not counting the writing part), it takes 5 minutes. My bad. You don’t need to make the same mistake.

You should also think about how often you plan to work on the site and add content or business listings. If you want to be hands-off, you should use a platform that will allow others to add their listings (for a fee or free) where you can simply moderate it. I didn’t do this on my sites, so this is a struggle. I get listing requests practically every day, so it’s a lot of additional work for me. It isn’t difficult, but it can be time consuming.

One reason you need to think about where you will be in a few months and/or even years is that development can be expensive, especially. However, if you go about it the wrong way, it can be even more expensive and anxiety-provoking down the road. I am very thankful this blog was built on Wordpress because it’s pretty easy to make changes to design, advertising, and even the SEO is practically done for me with a few plugins.

It’s essential to consider the amount of revenue you can derive from your site when you are making your plans. If you don’t really think people will pay for listings or advertisers won’t pay to be on your site, you should reconsider development. It can be expensive, and if you don’t really have a business plan, it can be a huge waste of money for you.

Because of the lack of knowledge I had when I started, I have to make a decision about whether to use a CMS on my geodomain names and then import all of my content, which will be a tedious and time consuming (expensive) job. Eventually I will get around to doing it, but there are other decisions and ramifications that will result.

The newest site I am working on will be an automated directory and should have limited online involvement from me. I’ve learned my lesson and gained enough knowledge, which I hope can help you as you develop.