Test driving GoDaddy’s fresh account manager

The fresh account manager is a big step up for managing domains at GoDaddy.

GoDaddy has released a beta version of its domain manager to a modest subset of users. If you haven’t gotten access yet, be patient. More users are being added over time.

I test drove the beta manager over the weekend and think it’s a nice step up from the old interface. It looks similar to the fresh Afternic interface, and that’s not by accident; it borrows a lot of themes from Uniregistry’s system.

Here are some things I like regarding it:

Profiles – This is a cool feature for quickly assigning settings to domains. Profiles let you assign a preset profile to domains, counting auto-renew status, domain lock, contact info, nameservers, and forwarding. It’s similar to GoDaddy’s DNS templates. This ought to save a lot of time.

Folders – You can now more easily put domains into different folders for sorting purposes. For example, you might create a folder of domains for clients vs. your own domains. You can assign access rights to these folders.

Sortable columns – Only a handful of columns in the old manager are sortable. Now, I can sort columns such as Ownership Date, Nameservers, etc.

Drag and drop columns – The old interface allows you to select which columns you view, but you can’t reorder them. With the beta interface, you just drag the columns where you’d like them. For example, you can move the Create Date and Ownership date columns next to each other for quick comparison.

Listing prices – You can now see a column with listing prices for your domains. And with the drag and drop columns, this means you can put the GoDaddy Appraisal and For Sale price columns next to each other to see if you are underpricing some of your domains. As of right now, clicking a price brings you to the listing dashboard. I hope in the future you can change the price from the control center.

Action bar – The fresh version has a handy action bar. If you select one or more domains, a persistent action bar shows up on the bottom of the screen so you can apply bulk changes (see image above).

Longer pagination – You can now include up to 1,000 domains on a page.

As I use the beta interface in the coming weeks, I’ll provide more thoughts. Feel free to chime in if you’ve been trying the beta interface and have opinions.