1. One nice option could be to allow the visitors to be able to change language. A multlanguage redirections service! I don't think that could be too difficult to do.
2. I think the "Whois" option is'nt the best. When you search you would type xxx.domain.com. You can type like www.microsoft.com and the scripts says that it's ready for registrations. It's quite funny =)
Much better should be if you only search for the subdomain.