Four ways to improve the Sedo bulk bidding interface.

If you missed the conclusion of Sedo’s December Great Domains auction, you missed some great deals. I picked up five good domains at nice prices. Don’t say I didn’t give you a heads up.

This was the first time I was bidding on multiple domains that closed at the same time on Sedo, so it was my first experience with Sedo’s “bulk” bidding system. It worked fine, but there are several ways it can be approved.

First, the good stuff. The interface it clean and loads relatively fast. The graphics on the left of each domain were intuitive: green means I’m winning, red means I’m losing, and yellow means the reserve isn’t met. Also, the domains are ordered by closing time as a default. That makes sense.

Now, here are a few ways to improve the interface:

Don’t make me agree to terms with each submitted bid. Perhaps because of its legacy offer/counter-offer system, every time you submit new bids you have to check a couple boxes. You’re agreeing to terms and conditions. But this adds steps — and time — to the bulk bidding process.

Add an “up” arrow to increase bids to next minimum bid increment. I kept getting an error when I submitted a few bids at once. The error message informed me that one of my bids was too low. I triple checked and found that my bids were all higher than the existing high bids. I finally deduced that one of them didn’t meet the next bid increment, even though it was higher than the current bid. Sedo could take a play out of the Snapnames playbook here. SnapNames has a little button you can click to increase your bid one “increment” above the existing bid. It’s rather intuitive.

Make error messages specific to a particular bid. See the previous recommendation. I was submitting three bids at once, but got a generic message that my bid was too low. It didn’t identify which bid was too low. If the message was directly below the domain at issue (or specified which one), it would have helped me figure out the problem much faster.

Create tooltips for the icons on the right. The icons to the right of the screen (see red circle) aren’t very intuitive. Who knew that a pencil lets you enter alerts? Add some tooltips that show when you hover over the icons.

Now, I’m not complaining. I got some great deals on five domains, and obviously I worked through the interface fine. But when I get carpal tunnel from checking all those confirmation boxes, you know who I’m calling.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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Sedo web site redesign launches today.

At the SedoPro Partner Forum in Key West this year, the company said it was working on a redesign of its site. The site had become outdated and needed a refresh.

The new design went live this morning:

The first thing you’ll notice is a much smaller home page that fits it the typical browser without scrolling down. To achieve this, Sedo has removed much of the real estate for current domain listings. It has replaced these with rotating boxes for featured domains, top domains, and auctions. The recent sales section has been removed from the home page, but you can find it on the Market Activity page. Also removed from the home page is a login box; you’ll now need to click on a link in order to login.

Once you get past the home page, you won’t see much of a difference if you aren’t logged in. But when you do log in, you’ll be greeted by a “domain management portal” which quickly shows you your activity level, parking earnings, and total sales for the past month and year-to-date.

The domain parking controls are largely unchanged, and users should be familiar with most aspects of the user interface when logged in to their account.

Overall my first impression is positive, although I’m sure a few minor annoyances will pop up. For example, it would certainly be nice for the login box to reappear on the home page.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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Google DNS is a big deal.

Google announced today that it is launching Google Public DNS, a free DNS resolver that promises to speed up the web. This is a big deal for web site owners and domainers. Here’s why.

1. Google may have just killed OpenDNS. OpenDNS does effectively the same thing Google hopes to do with its DNS. OpenDNS (which I personally use) makes money by showing ads when you type in a domain that doesn’t exist. This is similar to what Verizon does. Now Google is competing with OpenDNS, and has a lot more to gain datawise. Meaning it will probably be free, with no catches, and could kill OpenDNS if Google adds more features to match OpenDNS.

2. Google could bring the ad game to non resolving domains. If they want to, they can play the OpenDNS game (see #1).

3. Public DNS will enable Google to determine where your browser takes you. For now, the company claims it won’t hijack your browser and play tricks, but the potential is there.

4. Data, Data, Data. DNS operators get loads of data. From non-existent domain queries (which many ISPs have sold to domainers) to traffic data, it’s a lot more than Google already gets. Google gets most of its data from searches that start at Google. It also gets some from its Adsense ads, Google Analytics, etc. But now it has the power to get complete web browsing data for people who use its DNS. Imagine if it used this data in its search algorithms?

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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