Rebranding Your URL Can Decrease Your Usability
Posted on August 18th, 2006by Michael Gray in Tools
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Like anyone in the search space who does some background checking I subscribe to whois.sc Domaintools.com. The problem is when they rebranded a few months ago they switched from whois.sc to Domaintools.com, making it more difficulty to use especially for those of us who are bad spellers alphabetically challenged. I have no problem typing in whois.sc/example.com into the address bar (actually I usually put my cursor and type whois.sc/ over the “http://”) but I’m never going to go up there and type domaintools.com/example.com it’s just too long and I’m going to make a mistake and end up on some wonkadoodle typo landing page. Now to their credit you can they if you type in whois.sc/google.com the background voodoo happens and you get redirected to the right place, but somehow I feel my user experience was lessened along the way.
August 18th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Sounds like you need to throw together a little form tool for yourself, where all you do is enter in the domain name and it appends it to the url and heads off to the site. Or better yet, a Firefox extension (or IE/FF bookmarklet) to do the same thing. Just click it while you’re on the page, and off it goes.
August 18th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
To be honest, I use the whois.sc type in almost every day, and the rebranding hasn’t affected that aspect of my work hardly at all.
dazzlindonna: great idea on the FF extension - Too bad I don’t have the knowhow to put one together…
August 18th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
If you’re a Firefox user, you could also just use a key word shortcut. Then, even if domaintools.com decides to stop redirecting whois.sc, you just have to edit that keyword shortcut to whatever method they decide to use.
For example (a specific one, since it’s exactly what I use), I’ve got a bookmark that goes to http://whois.sc/%s with a keyword of ‘whois’. Just type in ‘whois wolf-howl.com’ and it automagically takes me to whois.sc/wolf-howl.com (which, of course, gets redirected to domaintools.com/wolf-howl.com, but that’s beside the point). If they should decide to quit the redirect, I can just change that bookmark’s URL to http://domaintools.com/%s. ‘whois wolf-howl.com’ still takes me to the same place, and I don’t have do any retraining on myself…
(Sorry to go off on a tangent from your topic of URL rebranding, but hopefully you found this mildly useful anyway!)
August 18th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Problem is … people get used to things and don’t want someone changing their habit. You are used to typing something to get something, and you like it that way.
The more you’re involved with it the more pissed you’re going to be about it being changed and you having no word on it. This is why you write it here.
Psychology … interesting stuff.
August 18th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Couldn’t agree more with the silliness of the … whatever is meant to be portrayed .. of domaintools.com
Yes it will re-direct and yes if one has the time and skills one can write some kind of extension .. one can write a program in xxx86 Assembler Code too … but when you have a website with the utility of whois.sc and a totally unique URL, what possible purpose would be served by telling users to us something clumsy and generic.
Just as with some of the comments I’ve seen here, one can have a web presence for the world or for the “insiders”. Trouble is, if you want to appeal only to the insiders your audience will never grow.
August 18th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
How about adding this to your FF toolbar?
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=domaintools.com&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search
August 18th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Agree on the name change, it was daft to say the least, but like you I still just use whois.sc
As for plugins, try this one:
http://seopen.com/firefox-extension/index.php
August 19th, 2006 at 9:14 am
I can do a whois of a domain I’m on with the simple press of a button. Just create a new bookmark in FireFox and put this code into the location box. Then just make sure the bookmark is in the tool bar folder….
javascript:location.href=’http:/’+'/whois.domaintools.com/browser/’+window.location.href.replace(’#',’|');
You’ll never have to type whois.domaintools.com/domain.com again…
August 21st, 2006 at 1:04 am
I may be missing something.. but if I type in whois.sc/example.com… the voodoo still happens and I go to the right place.
And if it eventually stops working, just bookmark the correct location (http://whois.domaintools.com/) and using FF find the bookmark, highlight and rightclick to get open in new tab.
Also, looks like they have a google toolbar extension so no typing of anything but example.com (assumes you have / use google toolbar in ff).