The Administration Tab

When you login to the control panel, you are presented with the Administration page. This is where you will be conducting most of your control panel activities. An immediate eyesore is the banner advertisements seen on the right hand side of the control panel. I see this as an unnecessary waste of my web browser real estate. I mean, I'm all for advertisements on the website (see advertisements on webhostcontrolpanels.com), but having ads within my control panel is a bit excessive.

Banner ads aside, I find the layout of the control panel somewhat organized; however, some of the sections really feel unnecessary and sometimes items are even duplicated. For example, there is a Go Directly To section that just lists the icon items. Luckily, you are able to minimize this section. Also, there is a Package Information section near the bottom of the control panel that is completely redundant since every item exists within the Account Tab.

For my mobile computing, I rely on a 12” PowerBook. The available browser window space is sparse, and I rather have a control panel that has all the essential items and minimal redundancy. On further thought, the Go Directly To section does have potential for my limited screen space IF the list was customizable. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The Administration tab definitely wants you to buy stuff. There’s a whole section called Order More Features. I find this a bit annoying along with the aforementioned banner ads. I’m here to control NOT buy!

The menu icons make sense most of the time (Lego block for Website builder), but some of them just fail (Military medal for Dynamic Content Catalog?). The one icon that I found missing was a Package Usage icon. I think this is an important item for any control panel, and not seeing a dedicated icon for it is bizarre. There are several text links to it in the Go Directly To section and the Package Information section though.

After clicking on any of the icons or text links, the interface changes to one that consists of a standard left-hand side menu and content window. Not to sound patronizing, but if you’ve ever used a regular vanilla plain web page, you’ll be able to navigate easily using the side menu. If you notice in the screen shot below, the package information section has items found in the Account tab. I don’t know why the developers didn’t just keep the account information separate.

One of the frustrating aspects of using the 1and1 Control Panel is the need to go through a 2 step process to access most of the web applications: (1) Click on the application using the menu item or icon and (2)Click on the launch button to launch the application.

The option to launch some applications from the EasyLogin is nice if you have it installed. When launching them from the EasyLogin, it opens the application in a browser and makes it a 1 step process. Unfortunately, there are only a limited number of applications you can launch this way. There were 2 application that could’ve been launch this way at the time of this writing.

The Account Tab

The Account tab is actually a much more pleasant place than the Administration tab. No banner ads are in sight, and all the sections make sense. The Go Directly To section is also included in this section, but again it’s minimizable. My gripes with the Administration tab would be reduced if it were more like the Account tab.

You can access all your account information from the Account section. Making changes to your information in the User Settings section is really a snap. I made numerous changes to my User Data, and each time there was very little lag and no error messages that appeared. One of the things that bother me is that when you click on the Change Password icon, your current password is displayed in all its glory. While it's good practice to change up your password and have multiple passwords for different thing, it was a bit unnerving to see one of my "grandmaster" passwords in plain sight. I like how 1&1 has Newsletter Settings right in the User Settings section so that a user can opt out. I don't mind the occasional emails sent to me though.