DomainTools.com Redesigns Whois History – Design and User Experience Upgrades Continue

DomainTools.com rolled out their new website home page last November and at that time they promised a transformation of their design and User Experience (UX) across their entire site. Well, they just delivered. They redesigned the UX to align with the users’ experiences.

One of the most powerful products DomainTools offers its members is the unique Whois History. I use the Whois History almost every day. This product contains valuable insight that can power many kinds of investigations, including researching the ownership history of a domain you wish to own, tracking down cyber-criminals and fraudsters before they hid behind Whois privacy protection and gathering evidence of ownership and usage of a given website.

Jeff Day, VP of ProductToday said: “Today we’ve made all of that much easier. We’ve redesigned the Whois History UX to be more intuitive and to provide a huge boost in functionality  in order to accelerate your research. The new Whois History makes it faster for you to pinpoint significant events in the history of a domain, such as ownership, Whois privacy, and contact information changes. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time required to investigate historical changes to a domain.”

What’s changed? Take a look!

• Total layout and UX redesign—This is not mere window dressing! The new look enables you to quickly find dates with changed records, while viewing and navigating the data at the same time.
• Filtering for fast search—Filtering helps you narrow a search and pull out those records that contain a specific bit of information, such as a person or organization name, phone number, physical address, etc.
• Whois record changes highlighted—You can now view the specific changes that occurred highlighted within the documents themselves. No more hunting back and forth between two records to find the differences!
• Screenshots with Whois records—Links to screenshots were added so you can track homepage changes at the time of the Whois record change without leaving the page.
• Inline Reverse Whois lookups
• Download and Bookmark records
• …and, importantly, we have not removed any functionality. You’ll still be able to accomplish everything you always could—and more!

The new site might take a while to get used to after many years of using the old one but it is pretty easy to figure out. I think it is step forward and has a lot of added functionality. DomainTools explains all the new features in this help page and video link:

• Whois History New Features and Navigation guide
• Video Product Tour of Whois History