Domainer Review and Giveaway
I am sure that a lot of you reading this own domain names and websites. It’s interesting to see how different people retrieve information for their various sites, but most use a variety of web services (Alexa for example) or simply the tools provided with your registrar. This is sufficient if you own a few domains, but if you’re like me, you can end up with a lot of information on a lot of sites which can be hard to manage. Domainer from Rage Software helps you manage the data on all your domains. This new app, aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains all from within one interface.
As you can see, the UI is intuitive and extremely easy to use. Although I’m not sure about some of the colors used, there are some neat translucent HUD windows which fade in and out to provide basic information about each site in the database. There is also a handy iTunes style sidebar (no doubt we will see a lot more of these when Leopard comes around), which gives you the option to add “groups” and “smart groups.” If you have a lot of domains to deal with, this will no dout be a handy feature.
Finally, there is a standard toolbar at the top allowing the easy addition and editing of domain information as well as a search feature. The app shows various statistics including Google pagerank, Alexa ranking, incoming links, and social tags. This makes it is useful if you want to quickly check the performance of multiple domains. Domainer, however, has one more neat trick up its sleeve. It can sync the dates that your domain names are due to expire with iCal. Although this doesn’t sound that spectacular, I can see it being particularly useful if you manage a lot of domains.
Domainer is a handy little app if you manage a lot of domains, however, the $40 retail price seems a little steep. I think that Rage Software has priced themselves out of a lot of the Mac shareware market. Luckily for you guys, you may not need to fork out the $40. Rage Software has kindly offered to give away five licenses of Domainer to MacApper readers. All you have you have to do is post a comment answering this question:
What new features would you like to see in Domainer?
Answer the question by October 25 at 10AM, and you will be entered to win one of the five free licenses. Good luck!
I like the way to manage my own domains. But with Domainer i can watch domains that i want to get. Integration iCal is great. Even with the “edit domain”you can see the most important part of the whois, the feature i miss is the option to see the full whois for the domain, i guess it will be good in the bottom of the application where we can see the pagerank.
It might be a good idea to add the common SEO check, eg. checking a site’s certain pages to see if they contains meaningful and suitable keyword meta, headings.
Fantastic! Looks useful…I’m going to take a long look at the features though. $40 seems a bit steep unless I am missing something. Is there a demo?
Yeah, this program seems a like a great idea but to shell out the 40 bucks? It just does not seem to have that many functions. But I would still like a free copy!:)
newswede,
YES, there is a demo! Check out this page for more info on that: http://www.ragesw.com/products/domainer/download/
Anyways, onto what could be added…
To add a whole new level to the application, something like Feedburner Stats (Taken using Feedburner’s API that makes the RSS Feed stats publc). Also, Mint (haveamint.com), and (google.com/analytics) Google Analytics integration would add a lot of value to this great app
I want Domainer to either: sync with a stats service, interpret server logs, or provide a way to be a stat tracker.
I’d also like it if Domainer could be like Pingdom and be check domain uptime.
Maybe even have Domainer check it’s Technorati/Digg/Social Site ratings.
It’s beautiful and due to its iTunes like interface it is very easy to use. But I would very much like to see it translated into Brazilian Portuguese. How about a Cover Flow like feature to display and switch among domains? It could show the homepage of each domain managed by Domainer.
Sorry guys, I should have added – it is shareware and does indeed have a free trial available on the website.
An app like this should be able to store all of the various server addresses and passwords associated with hosting websites, email, FTP, etc. That would be enough to lead me to pay for it.
I downloaded the demo and been playing with it. Love it, but like stated here, $40 bucks is too steap for something like this.
It’d be great if they could partner with a registrar (or two, or three,) and have a more tightly integrated tracking and even purchasing/renewal system. Taken a bit further, it would be awesome to be able to update contact info, etc from an app instead of a web page. Tall order, I don’t know registrars that have apis available, but definitely something to look into.
Integrate with google analytics. I hate having to pop over to google, log in, switch domains, switch domains, switch domains. It’d be fantastic to have overviews available right there on my desktop (dashalytics doesn’t cut it, or even work for me.)
We can collect all sorts of information in one place already. Provide some shortcuts to thinks like “open in ftp (of your choice)”, “connect via ssh,” etc.
I downloaded the demo, added one URL, then the app crashed. Now whenever I open the app it crashes… I had high hopes for this app, ah well.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the great feedback.
Dan Booring – You can do all this with the current version. Domainer even syncs with your Keychain to store your FTP passwords securely.
Rob – If you could send your domain and some system details to us form http://www.ragesw.com/support/ we can take a look at hopefully get this fixed ASAP.
Again, thanks for the all great feedback,
Wish this was built into Coda. Be great to manage the content of a website and the meta-business of a website in one app.
well, what i’d like to see is integrated domain search for NEW domain names and possible integrated browser tools (like a browser button) to add info on the fly from sites like godaddy or other registrars..
so to be specific: i’m inside domainer and click a lookup button – i can either use an existing domain and it will search for available variations or i can look up new stuff and save those of interest in a little group inside domainer (like ‘future ideas for domains’) perhaps through simple lookups on bustaname or something…
I think broken link detection, HTML, and CSS validation would be a great addition.
I think integration with a few other popular stats tracking programs would be awesome (feedburner and especially mint). Also, I’d like to see more fields for keeping track of domain information. In order to take advantage of a number of domain name “sales” I’ve had to create multiple Yahoo! business accounts – so being able to keep track of what my username and pw were would be awesome!
Hey guys, some great ideas here.
Must apologise for the me not mentioning the FTP. There was a screenshot of an inspector that the editor must have removed, that showed everything that you could store. (Yes basically I am passing the blame on :p )
@the first Jason – So your feature request is a web editing suite be included with Domainer
I have to say Feedburner integration would be pretty darn sweet.
Remember guys this app is targeted at mass domain buyers (as well as standard owners) anyone got ideas for new features on that front?
I think it looks nice. I also think it’s a little pricey. Something I’d like are either some custom fields for each domain or at least a specific field to store when hosting began (for billing) and the anniversary date or next bill date, maybe a checkbox to distinguish between clients’ websites and personal ones, and a field to set the last date the site was updated or changed. Not as useful for a blog/cms but important for web apps and custom codebases.
If Domainer could connect and interface with Plesk, or have an open plugin system where you could develop plugins to interface with Google Apps etc, and it act as a centralized administration interface, that would be fantastic, and revolutionary. Hell, I would pay 3 times the cost of the product now if it had those capabilities.
Integration with Mint would be awesome.
Different Dustin than above
Would be nice if it integrated with site statistic programs like webalizer, google anylitics, and stat counter.
It would also be nice if you could see query times from MySQL/Postgrey/Access/SQLServer DBs associated with the site.
For mass domain purchasing, it would be great if it was integrated with a “recommendation engine” that would provide options of other, similar, domain names the purchaser might be interested in.
Also… the ability to use Domainer to submit/manage bids in domain auctions, etc. for expired domains.
Of course, integration with one/more registrars to enable complete domain ownership management from within the tool would be awesome.
looks great. love the interface.
Two things that immediately struck me,
1. No ALT tag tooltips as you mouse over buttons, elements etc.. This is my primary way of exploring software and is an instant turnoff. Don’t make me open a manual to explore.
2. Animation effects that go too slowly that that achieve nothing other than simply slowing down my user experience. They’re like traffic lights to me. Great if done swiftly – very slick, also with an option to turn on and off, otherwise very annoying.
I’d like to see a way to pull in stats from FeedBurner. I redirect all my feeds through FeedBurner for stat tracking and feed optimization, and it’d be nice to see stats for number of subscribers and such with everything else this fine piece of software offers.
Just downloaded it and entered my three “biggest” sites into it to check. I love the interface and fingers crossed, I might win
1) I’d like to see an integrating of siteadvisor.com or some similar service that scans your website for potential viruses. I once had a Russian spammer guess my FTP password and secretly add spyware popups to my site. Yet since I used popup blockers, I had no idea for a good two weeks or so until people started complaining about it.
B) It’d be interesting to see if you could pull more Whois data. I own God knows how many websites and some I keep under different alias because I don’t actually run them but instead let my siblings us them. So I have to make sure I keep private whois on those, public whois on others, etc. It gets to be a pain in the ass trying to manage which whois says what versus what they should say.
Tres) Add more stats on how people view your sites and how they get there! RSS feed count, browser share, top Google search keywords, etc. All of this stuff is available on the free stat counters out there, so it’d be nice if a $40 program included them as well.
I second the FeedBurner request. But I wouldn’t mind also seeing something a little less technical.
I’ve had domains for many years, but it wasn’t until recently that I cared to start looking at where traffic was coming from, etc. Much of this stuff is new to me. I still have no idea what Alexa does and how you are rated, etc.
It would be nice to build-in some sort of “help” system that explains all these services, and offers tips and hints on how to improve your rankings, etc. Maybe building it in as an RSS feed type of thing so that new tips could easily be added all the time.
I also agree that $40 is kind of a heavy price tag. $30 would be a little easier to swallow.
i would like to see the ability to see how many people are subscribed to your website and any feeds on your website.
I really like the look of it, and upon exploring it actually has a lot of the features I would have requested (FTP info for example), but the price is probably double what I would pay for it. As for suggestions…
Mostly integration. Integration with Google Analytics and Feedburner for stats, Google Adsense for monetization, Google Adwords to track campaigns, SEDO for parked domains and their performance and domain recommendation services to help me get the best domains. I know I’ve just picked the most popular services there, but you get the gist.
I also think it would be cool if you could use it to track development. Maybe integration with something like iGTD (through tags I guess?) and the ability to store more info against each domain, or associate it with a development environment and other relevant documentation.
I think a big win would be if the developers could negotiate discounted domain purchases through one of the major registrars if you go through the software. Then you could tie them together so it becomes a one-stop-shop for finding, purchasing and running domains.
So, basically, I want the world, and I want it for half price
For the cost, I had hoped that in addition to showing PageRank, AlexaRank, and Delicious tags, that it would help with improving the rankings and tags. Having an interface to do that, or to submit to search engines easily from within the app, would make this a home-run application.
Okay, I have nothing different from what everyone else suggests, and I agree with pretty much everything everyone has said. So here are the points I would reenforce by reiterating them:
This is a pretty cool little application but it’s definitely overpriced for the number of features it provides. It really needs to have more statistics available; even just adding some simple things, like more Whois info would help.
It would really start to be a killer application, and worth some money, if it plugged into Google Analytics, HaveAMint, Google Adwords, Feedburner and other statistics sources.
The biggest thing this app needs is a price drop; just dropping it to $20.00 would really crank up its salability, I think; either that or leave the price and add features that make it worthwhile. I know that’s never something a developer wants to hear, but it’s something to consider.
[...] week ago, I reviewed Domainer, the new Domain information manager app from Rage Software. I thought maybe a tool of this nature [...]
Well, I have so many domains to manage and it sounded so good, I went ahead and bought it straight up. I wish I’d waited till I’d demo’ed the app first.
The developer states you can import details from a txt file from your DomReg. This is true but VERY limited; you can’t map your nameservers to the fields supplied and there are no fields for: Private, locked, Reg/Admin contacts or most importantly, key info etc. Sure you can add these infos to the Comments field manually but when you have 50+ domains you need to set aside the whole afternoon (yawn). It’s almost seems like the developer either just didn’t think things through, was in a big hurry or has no idea about domain management.
This app has huge potential but needs some follow through at the basis levels. I’d give it a 5.5
Hi Guys, I just found a prettyb nice site for a free iphone unlock / jailbreak/ iphone 3g 3gs and iphone4 jailbreak.
http://www.anysim.net/
http://www.bmw-eba.de.tl
Superior thinking demsnotrated above. Thanks!