GoDaddy Improves Control Panel Usability

I just got an email from Alicia R. at GoDaddy.com regarding a post I’ve made on 1and1 Vs GoDaddy. In this post I mentioned how I found GoDaddy’s control panel to be “sort of confusing”.

GoDaddy reacted to this and decided to improve their control panel usability. If you log into your GoDaddy control panel (also known as the Hosting Control Center), you will see four (4) large buttons at the top of the page, just above your Account Summary:

The File Manager allows you to manage (of course!) your website’s files. Be careful, this is not a website builder! For example, you can delete, create, rename or edit files. You can also use it to extract files from a zip archive.

The second button (Your Applications) brings you to Go Daddy Hosting Connection. It is an application installer to help you install some of the most common web tools like Wordpress, OpenX, Joomla, osCommerce, etc. This quick-installer is very useful if you don’t intend to install your applications manually.

The third button brings your to the domain management interface. From there you will be able to manage subdomains or assign a domain you registered with GoDaddy to your hosting account.

And last, the email management button brings you back to your GoDaddy Account Home. From there you will be able to either add email credits or management your SMTP or email forwarding accounts.

I have to say that if those buttons were there when I got my GoDaddy account, I wouldn’t have searched for 15 minutes just to setup an email forwarder.

While adding all those buttons to the Hosting Control Center is a really good improvement, I still think it’s a bit confusing to be brought back to your GoDaddy Account when clicking on Your Email. I mean one would think that all those functions would be available from a single control panel but they’re not.

Let me explain.

First I login to my GoDaddy account. Then from my Hosting Account List, I click on Manage Account and a new window pops up. From there, I click on Your Email and a third window pops up! I now have three web browser windows opened just to manage my GoDaddy hosting account.

I mean this is not the end of the world but to the average computer user, this can be quite confusing.

Instead I would’ve thought that the email management button would bring me to another page (still from the Hosting Control Center) from where I could manage all my email accounts and forwarders. And from there I would be informed if I needed to buy additional credits or not, with a link (or instruction) that tells me how to buy some.

Still I gotta give two thumbs up to GoDaddy for their neverending quest to provide better customer satisfaction.

Keep up the good work and thank you to Alicia R. from GoDaddy for contacting me on this subject.

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