Reviewing a year of updates in 2021
A condensed view of all the updates, features, and changes published and implemented throughout the whole of 2021.
As well as writing a series of posts with an overview of UK domain sales in 2021, I thought I would do the reverse for the updates section – giving you a condensed view with all of the changes published and implemented over the last 12 months.
The blog only went live in July of 2021, so I guess technically you will only be getting a 6 month review but either way, it’s nice to see the updates all packaged up into a single post.
January 2021 – Official launch of Domain Sales History v2.0
The first iteration of a database which aggregates .uk domain name sales was found at seemly.co.uk, which I initially started building back in 2015.
It was both a passion project, and one I could use to improve my knowledge and skillset in web app development, helping expose me to technologies I didn’t have the most confidence with.
It helped me learn loads along the way allowing me to build skills and confidence in PHP, CSS, project architecture, and much more.
Read UK Domain Sales History – An introduction.
July 2021 – Launch of the Domain Sales History blog
The domainsaleshistory.uk blog finally came to fruition in July of 2021.
This was always a long term aim when I decided to rebuild the app in Laravel, back in December 2020. I always wanted to make the data more accessible, and more intriguing for UK domainers, but also to maybe try and help raise the profile of the UK namespace – if only marginally.
What better way than to write monthly sales reports? So far I have written a monthly sales report for 6 consecutive months.
Highlighting domains with prior sales
I made it easier to highlight domains that have prior sales history.
Hovering on the star tells you how many times the domain name has sold before. This is a feature restricted to members only, so you will only see this if you have an account and are signed in.
August 2021 – Sales report dashboard
August 2021 update was for administrator usage only, allowing me to collate and display most of the data I include in the monthly sales reports.
I added panels that breakdown sales into groups, like:
- LLL domains sold this month
- Sales per domain extension
- Total sales revenue grouped by currency code
- Transactions grouped by Sales Platform
I also added functionality to allow me to navigate from month to month, so I can go back and write sales reports for any month in the past.
This made my life so much easier when it came to writing each sales report as collecting the data always proved to be time consuming, so it would have been silly of me to not automate this as much as possible.
Limited Public API access
August 2021 also saw me start to write some stuff for the public API. The type of functionality I am looking to implement will cover:
- Exact match domain search
- Keyword term search, including “like” queries
- Filter results based on Domain properties, including:
- Extension
- Character type (string, number)
- Length
- Hyphenated
- Filter results based on Transaction properties, including:
- Sales Platform
- Publisher (where the sale was announced)
- Currency code
- Year
- Month
- Advanced filters including:
- Domain length less and/or more than
- Extension is not “.org.uk,.me.uk”, to only display .uk and .co.uk results
- Sale Date filters
- Today
- x days ago
- x months ago
- Start date
- End date
I have since decided to put this on the back burner as I felt the blog should take more of a priority. The API will eventually be used to allow me to visualise data in charts and graphs, but I don’t feel like this will be implemented any time soon.
October 2021 – Sales report sign posting
In October I decided to add sign posting to try and promote the sales reports found on the blog.
The reason I added this was to improve awareness of regular sales reports, and to try and drive traffic to the blog in general – both from a user perspective, but also to help get content indexed in search engines.
Making use of the fairly recent addition to WordPress of the JSON API, I created a little wrapper to retrieve, parse, and display clickable cards that link to the latest 3 sales reports.
I will eventually create a site wide footer that displays a more low profile version of this component, but this is a step in the right direction.
Admin dashboard improvements
I made further additions to the Sales Report admin dashboard, which again doesn’t benefit everyday users, but gives me additional stats to reference in sales report posts.
I basically created 3 additional tables that display the top 10 sales per platform, as well as the top 10 LLL domain sales.
I feel that these items can prove beneficial to me, and give me quick access to insights I might otherwise miss.
December 2021 – Reported sales data from UKBackorder.com reduced
Unfortunately, Rob from UKBackorder.com got in touch to let me know that for the most part sales data from will be stopped. It is worth mentioning that Rob did suggest that he will try to report larger sales where he can.
Doing a quick query on my end, the first sale recorded at UKBackorder.com was 23rd November, 2018.
I calculate that £462,114 worth of sales have been reported since then, which averages out to around £12,489 per month.
That’s going to be a huge hit to the monthly sales reports, and make the figures much less appealing. 😭