Wife: why can’t I find adenosinetriphosphate anymore?
me: i deleted it :)
Wife: I thought that was an awesome domain :(
me: was that you voting it up? lol
Wife: I never clicked it
Wife: put it back on
Wife: just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean others wont
me: haha no one will register that hun
Wife: me and my coworker were thinking about it if we were to have a site

I’m very happy with the way things went today. There were no major problems and the feedback from HackerNews was, as always, insightful and constructive.

I spent the majority of the day making lots of minor changes, which is reflected by my responses in the thread.

HN Todo List:

Scrolling through the comments, these are the tasks that stand out:

• Need to add “Register Now” links to various registrars
• Add the ability to do custom keyword searches
• Consider targeting domain name collectors, as they are a big audience
• Improve the price display on the registration page and maybe move it to the homepage
• Search feature should be more prominent

By the Numbers:

• 3,567 page views by 1,661 visitors
• Avg Time on Site: 1:47
• 3 registrations, though all 3 abandoned at the payment page.
• Whois Lookups: 1,511 (note: that’s a 91% participation rate on the homepage — usability success)
• Most importantly… Domains Registered: 8

I emailed two of people who signed up but didn’t complete the payment to find out if there were any problems. No, one of them said, he just didn’t see the price. Probably the same with the other two.

Notes:

– IE6: I hate you still. (more on this tomorrow)

– Not many people explored the domains past the first two pages. Need to find some way of improving this. It will be interesting to see what the results are when I start promoting the site within the domain name community.

– Need to improve the organization of the domains on the homepage. Most of those 1,511 clicks went to the Top 10 list (which is the first thing you see). Since the colors are all relative, this caused all the ones in the Recent section to be skewed heavily towards white.

– At the beginning of the day I wasn’t limiting the view count to unique IP addresses. After about two hours, someone started voting up domain names like adenosinetriphosphate.com, which got placed in the top 10 list. It’s unlikely anyone is going to register it, so it would have stayed there ad infinitum until some other prankster found a stupider one to upvote. So, I limited it to one vote/IP, which helped, but it may still be a problem. This will largely be fixed by finding a better way to organize the front page.

– Another startup launched about the same time as Domain Pigeon on HN. It was interesting watching the two threads all day. Their site, Taxi Mogul, received more initial upvotes and stayed a few places higher than Domain Pigeon most of the day. Currently, we’ve both received about the same number of votes, but DP has about twice as many comments, which is likely a function of me relentless responding to every comment, even if just to say thanks. Ultimately, promotion on HackerNews, like TechCrunch, doesn’t matter much. It’s what you do afterward the initial traffic that matters.

– On that note, it’s been a long day and tomorrow will be busy too.