Dotkeeper meets – Lisa Box

“Think about the voice experience when you choose your domain name. You should be able to say it out loud. This is something that is going to be extremely relevant for the future.”
– Lisa Box, Vice President Of Strategic Alliances, WP engine (WordPress)

During NamesCon, Marcus Glaad got an interview with Lisa Box.

I entered the domain name market 17 years ago, 2002, the big question I’ve been hearing since then is “how will domain names stand the time?” What’s your take on that?

My personal opinion is that, the way that we have tried to make the mobile web faster by circumventing the actual domain name itself, or the web site experience, has not taken flight. It was overwhelmed with too many apps and alternative technologies that was too hard to develop.

Instead, improve the mobile pages and make the actual experience of the website act like an app. The recent advancements in these technologies gives it almost the same functionality. I think that by expanding the functionality to go to the website itself through the mobile device will make domain names more valuable.

What’s your key takeaways from 2018 when it comes to internet uses and mobile uses and so on?

I think the biggest thing is the difference between the generations, and how they interact with the web. This is the largest shifting generations that we have seen in the past. Since the dawn of the Internet, you have had a keyboard, some sort of screen and you typed in your searches. Now what we are seeing is screenless searches, voice activated. It’s a very different divide right now. As a professional in this industry you have to think of how to close that divide. What are the tools and techniques we need?

How to act on the diverse users on the internet?

Keep a mobile mindset, and voice technology is going to be huge. We have developed a voice technology for WordPress called Polly, which actually enables text to speech for anything. So, for accessibility, for younger generations and for all of that, we now have the ability to make those sorts of transitions very easily. The tools are now imbedded so it’s not hard anymore.

… Which means you should focus more on the “radio test” when you pick domain names?

Definitely. It used to be “How can you spell it out?” and “What are the whops areas?”. Now you should say it out loud. Think about the voice experience when you choose your domain, that is something that’s going to be extremely relevant for the future.

What do companies need to think of when they’re entering a new year?

Take a serious look at how to invest in your mobile strategy. 40 percent is not enough. If you are getting more than half of your traffic from mobile, 60-80 percent, there is where your focus should be. If you take your eye of that ball, you will actually fall behind what the user experience are demanding of you.

In terms of domain name use, is there any special takeaway on how to use, protect and develop within domain names and so on?

When you are looking to develop domain names, there are a lot of tools to make it easy now, such as WordPress or AMP, so it’s not as hard anymore to develop feature rich content experiences. We should be working with our developers to make those experiences much more relevant. It will help us get more users and so on.

Any final tips for our clients and readers?

Realize that domains are still a great investment, speculation might get harder over time, but if you develop those feature rich content experiences, the domains that you have will increase in value over time.