I’ve just revamped one of the first websites I ever built. Domparison is a domain name price comparison website - it does exactly what it says on the tin (who remembers Ronseal?!), comparing prices for domain registration, renewal and transfers on various extensions.

One of the problems I originally had with the site was that some of the registrars list prices in USD (dollars), whereas others list prices in GBP (pounds). Originally, I listed the USD prices and GBP prices as they were and simply indicated what currency each price was. When I first made the website database-driven, around a year ago, I started listing all prices in USD. This meant that, in addition to having to periodically update all prices, I also had to frequently obtain the latest exchange rates and calculate the GBP prices in USD in order to update them. This was clearly quite a chore.

What I have done this time is written a PHP script that scrapes the latest exchange rates from Reuters. Using a cron job, this script automatically executes periodically on my server, fetching the latest exchange rates and automatically converting all the GBP prices in the database into USD.

The site has also had a bit of a face lift - I felt the previous design was a little cumbersome in the  look and feel department, so I have ditched the blue-based colour scheme and gone for a light grey one.

Next on my agenda is to create a mailing list so that users can be informed every time a mass price update takes place. I’m currently thinking I may go the whole hog and allow users to create accounts - then I could allow users to rate and review each registrar. If you have any other suggestions, let me know!

Hopefully my fellow domainers will find Domparison useful - and hopefully they will like the improvements I’ve made!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:42 am and is filed under Domains, HCI, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.