‘Stop Browsing. Start Building’ is certainly a tagline that OpenSRS can get behind. That’s why it made perfect sense that the company behind the slogan, Yola.com, chose OpenSRS to provide domain registration and management services. Yola provides a way for small businesses to easily create and manage a website with no technical skills required.
Yola.com was founded in 2005, in Cape Town, South Africa, getting its start as an affiliate business that needed a way for their customers to quickly and easily create affiliate websites and pages.
Later, they spun off the website creator tool as Synthasite and things took off from there. The company picked up the current Yola.com branding in 2009, a name that Chris Muller, Director of Business Development for Yola.com, says better represents what the company is all about.
“The name Yola comes from a hindi word that means ‘hatch’,” says Muller. “The Yola brand has helped us move beyond the basics of website building with the Synthasite name to establish us a place to build and grow your entire business online. We also loved that we were able to get a domain name that was short, phonetic, and would work around the globe.”
Yola’s focus is what the company calls ‘micro-businesses’–small companies with one to five employees–and the company’s goal is to help them get online, and establish a web presence.
“Micro-businesses don’t have either the budget or the time to manage a large website but they do need to get their brand out online and maintain a web presence,” says Muller. “That’s where Yola comes in.”
Domains were a focus from the start
Yola has adopted a ‘freemium model’ whereby users can create a free site on a subdomain. Paying customers can buy a premium package that allows them to buy and use their own domain name, along with more advanced features like premium themes and additional storage.
“Domains were the first product that we charged for on our website,” says Muller. “From the start, we realized there was a revenue opportunity there.”
“It’s fundamental to a small business’ needs. If I own Chris’s Coffee Shop, I need to own ChrissCoffeeShop.com. In addition to the Twitter account and everything else that I have to do, I need that domain,” he says.
Muller says that offering domains fits in with Yola’s approach to providing a “one-stop shop” for their customers when it comes to their online presence.
“If they’re coming to us for their web presence, and they’re coming to us to build the website and everything else that’s on it,” he says, “then I think it’s logical to let them manage everything, including the domain name, from one place.”
ccTLDs and Name Suggest to help customers find the perfect domain
Yola’s userbase is global–50% of their users are outside of the U.S.–and because of this, they recently added ccTLDs to the mix of domain offerings.
“We just added .co.uk, .eu and .ca domains based on a combination of where our traffic comes from, and what our customers have been requesting,” says Muller. “It’s been great. We simply added them to a drop-down and their sales have taken off without any marketing push. It’s an important step towards localization.”
Yola sees the domain name as a critical part of offering localized service to their customers. Muller notes that “having a localized domain name is almost as important, or even more important, than having a localized website.”
Yola also makes use of the name suggestion tool that is a part of the OpenSRS API. They offer up relevant alternative domain suggestions to users during the initial search and help their users find the perfect domain name for their business.
Muller says they realized that SMBs are building a brand around a domain, and that helping the customer find the right domain goes a long way in ensuring that customer is successful and remains a customer for the long term. He says Yola makes extensive use of the name suggestions and that they’ve found that the OpenSRS tool to be “very effective for us and very helpful.”
Managing a move
Yola came to OpenSRS after starting out with another domain name registrar.
“We chose OpenSRS because of their robust APIs and the flexibility that their platform offered around messaging and options such as a variety of ccTLDs that we could offer down the road.”
Fortunately, the experience that OpenSRS has in managing transitions onto the OpenSRS platform from other Registrars meant the move went very smoothly.
“It worked out really well. Working with Steve Barnes (Business Development Manager at OpenSRS) saved us lots of days and the transition went really well,” Muller recalls. “It was fantastic, as smooth as we could expect.”
Poised for growth
As for the future, Muller says Yola is intent on continuing to help small business manage and grow their online presence. On the services side, Yola is partnering with Logoworks by HP to offer professional design services, Wpromote to offer search engine marketing, and TRUSTe for management of privacy policies.
On the domain side, Muller says “We’ve done a lot of work over the past few months with domains, like adding ccTLDs, adding transfers, changing the way we do availability checks. We’re really excited.”
Adding the ability for customers to transfer domains to Yola and OpenSRS from other Registrars or webhosts was no brainer, according to Muller. “Allowing customers to transfer domains that they already own to Yola helps us become a one-stop shop for small businesses online.”
Looking at the product roadmap, Chris says Yola is going to keep adding value to their premium bundles and expand their resources for small businesses. One of the ways they’re going to do this is by including domains and related functionality in the core offerings. He also said they’ll continue to expand the ccTLD offerings and continue to refine their domain suggestion tool to help customers find the perfect domain name on which to build their business.
Effective today, we’ve lowered the price on some VeriSign-branded SSL certs sold through OpenSRS. OpenSRS resellers automatically get the benefit of these lower prices which went into effect today, March 11th, 2010.
The .TEL domain extension is almost a year old and that means it’s time to think about renewals.
We’re big fans of WordPress here at OpenSRS, and for good reason–it offers an open source, stable and highly extensible base on which to build websites and it comes complete with an active, passionate community of users and developers.
The Board of Directors of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is currently seeking interested individuals to serve as members on its 2010 Election Nomination Committee. Applications for consideration to become a member of the Nomination Committee will be accepted from January 4 to January 22, 2010.