Today GoDaddy unveiled a redesign of their homepage. It’s incredibly “web2.0″ with a whole bunch of slick gradients. Too bad it’s like 5 years too late. We use GoDaddy quite a bit for domain registration (matter o’ fact, I personally bought 2 domains last week) so the Need for a redesign was quite apparent (view the waybackmachine). However… this one is a couple french fries short of a Happy Meal.
I’ll start with the cons:
Cons
- It’s still a complicated mess. A cluster-[insert 4 letter word here]. At one glance I can’t find anything I want to… except Danica Patrick. Who is hott/hawt/xxxHOTxxx, but NASCAR Indy doesn’t make me want to buy a domain.
- UPDATE: After looking at the code again, I noticed it’s a TABLE LAYOUT! SINNNNNNERRRRR!
- The rounded corners are doing nothing. Rounded corners are supposed to sooth the reader and the content into place, make it “feminine” if you will.
- The <title> tag doesn’t even have the company’s name in it. Granted this may be a GOOGLE HAXX, but it’s generally assumed you should include the Company Name in there.
- A brief look under the hood exposes a conundrum of inline CSS, bloaty non-obfuscated javascript, and (according to Safari’s Web Inspector) 11 Errors.
- I get Dale Jr. and Danica, but I don’t know who Amanda and Candice are and/or why I should choose them to help me buy a domain. I’m pretty sure they’re strippers.
Pros
- Danica Patrick is hott/hawt/xxxHOTxxx(?)
- The login form is more accessible than it was before. Good Job Go Daddy!
I think ultimately what the redesign actually should have done is put a HUMONGOUS “$1.99 DOMAINS! SEARCH HERE” and had a large input box for me to look for domains… since that is always my first step in buying a domain. They could of even had Danica or one of those hot stripper girls pointing at it.
I think I’m done here. Good try, godaddy, better luck next time! I’ll still use your services though.
as soon as i saw the logo was the same, I pretty much ignored everything.
This is a good point about the logo. That is really its own future entry… “worst corporate logos ever”.
Dave, Danica drives Indy not NASCAR. BOO!
I also just noticed that the aforementioned logo was (poorly) photoshopped onto Danica’s jacket. Brilliant
nah dude, you can print directly onto zippers and over seems now.
Never mind that the old website as bad as it looked performs better than the new monstrosity. The redesign slows down my Firefox for me. And I have a 2Ghz laptop with 2GB of ram. Granted I have alot open but, it seems slower than a great deal of other sites that I have opened today with the same conditions.
Who actually runs this over there? Was it some committee that mandated MORE GRADIENTS MORE AJAXY FADES MORE GRADIENTS!!!
Ha. Exactly! I just assume if you’re going to use a gradient, the site should be table-less. I’ll have to buy a domain to see if they’ve fixed the 10 screens of upgrades before you actually buy your domain.
Damned thing won’t let Firefox stick in my passwords automatically.
Put that on the list of cons will ya.
I should add that no matter how much it sucks… I’ll stay with them because they’re the only registrar that doesn’t steal every domain I search for but don’t register within a few hours (so far).
Not to mention the inconsistent light source *blah*