Webnames.ca Staff
Welcome to our improved dashboard, and more powerful domain management
One of the challenges in building and maintaining a web presence is the number of service providers that are involved, including DNS, web hosting, email, and SSL certificates. It’s not always easy to keep straight which service is with whom. The complexity of this task is further compounded by dashboards.
Dashboards – each of your providers has one, right? Tables, buttons, toggles, drop downs, pop-ups, and more buttons. Dashboards have become the go-to way of managing a provider’s services, but they have an obvious limitation – they only manage the services of that one provider.
If you use a bunch of providers (think domain registrars, DNS, hosting and email providers) then you’re likely dealing with a bunch of accounts and dashboards to manage all of those individual services, and perhaps even keeping a password app or spreadsheet populated with the details of what service is used where. While this method works, it’s not ideal or an especially streamlined way to manage your domains.
A desire to remove these hurdles led us to the design of our new domain dashboard. We set out to build a dashboard that transcends any one service provider and gives you a holistic overview of your online presence. To take this a step further, we wanted to build a system that would discover and maintain all this information automatically – freeing you from the work of pulling it all together yourself.
This kind of integration is a win-win for everyone, allowing you to:
- Quickly understand the different components that make up your web presence
- See at a glance the providers of each service connected to your domain
- Use the dashboard as a central starting point for accessing your various accounts
- Are you self-hosted? No problem, our system also allows for custom, private links for any service to anywhere accessible via a URL
Now that our dashboard upgrades are live, we wanted to give you a rundown of the new features and how we think they’ll improve your user experience.
Improved visibility into your domain-related services, both at Webnames and your other providers
Your Webnames Services
Under the updated dashboard, managing your Webnames domains and services will be faster. Now, instead of clicking through on a given domain under your domain list to review or tweak its services, the new domain manager provides:
- Upfront visibility into what services are attached to a domain (for example, DNS, Web Hosting, Email, and SSL)
- The ability to add or manage Webnames services (DNS, Web Hosting, Email or SSL) directly from the dashboard
Services at External Providers
Most domain dashboards only provide an overview of a provider’s own services. Our new domain manager now goes miles further by providing details about DNS, web hosting, email and SSL for all your domains, regardless of where they are registered. On top of that, it now also supports easy one-click access to the management page of your other service providers.
Shining a Light on Less Known Services
The updated dashboard also now makes ancillary domain settings more visible and accessible. Under Other Services, you can access all of our most popular domain settings with a single click, in addition to seeing which ones are currently being used on a particular domain.
Better Integration of Bulk Tools
If you have a large domain portfolio and use our bulk tools to manage it, you’re also going to gain some efficiencies with this update. All bulk functions can be performed directly in the domain manager – no longer do you need to navigate to a separate interface to manage things like nameserver changes, forwarding, or renewals across large numbers of domains.
Improved Organization Through Tags
Another area we’ve made improvements in is organization. Until now, users could organize their domain names in folders. While this worked well, it was constrained by the fact that a domain could only reside within one folder. A more flexible approach is to assign attributes to an item and to allow an unlimited number, thereby removing any categorization constraints.
This is the approach we’ve taken with our new feature, Tags.
Moving forward you will be able to create and assign an unlimited number of tags to your domain names. Tags can be created, assigned, removed and deleted at any time. With this new flexibility, you are free to organize your domain portfolio using the terminology and structure that is most meaningful to you. There are no limits and no constraints. Use tags to indicate the function, responsibility, department, use, project, or owner of a particular domain, then zero-in on the ones you need with powerful filtering tools.
- Create and assign arbitrary tags to domain names, then group or filter by these tags
- Assign more than one tag to a domain and/or more than one domain to a tag
For customers who previously made use of our folders feature, we’ve mapped and assigned equivalent tags to your domains to get your started in the new domain manager interface.
Powerful Filtering and Sorting
The refreshed dashboard also carries over a number of useful features from our previous domain management interface. Located above the list of your domains is the option to filter and sort them, and this is a great way to quickly locate domain names based on their status, attached services, renewal settings, dates, tags or other attributes.
By using filtering, sorting, and tags in combination with bulk tools, the day-to-day management of large domain portfolios become a breeze.
Let Us Know What You Think
Did you get all that? We know it’s a lot to digest, but we’re confident that once you get going you’ll find the new dashboard intuitive and powerful. For those of you who prefer to stay in slow lane where user interface changes are concerned, rest assured, the original interface will remain available via a link at the top right of the new page for some time to come.
We’re really excited about these updates, and while early user feedback has been enthusiastic, we care about every user’s experience. So let us know what you think – the good, the bad, and the ugly – because we take our core value of “always be improving” to heart and look to you to help us be better.
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If you are interested in using the Bulk Domain Tools mentioned above, or other power tools designed for managing large domain portfolios, visit our Advanced Management Tools page for more information.