This week’s review is about BradsDeals.com. Bradsdeals.com happens to be the last item in Yan’s this month revision of popular deal sites and is also the youngest site (Jun 2005) without a review.
This is a really simple site with a handful of clear menu items on top, taking to various sections of the sites. Briefly, the three vital sections of the site are deals, coupons and forums.
Like many other sites, every deal posted to the main site, results in one thread added to the forum. There is also a section in the forum, which lets users submit deals, however there is not a very high amount of activity there. Coupons section has a decent collection of coupons (2000+ coupons from 800+ stores).
There is a site search right on top of every page. A quick checked proved to be very unimpressive. I tried to search for “external hard drive”. There are several items, with the same phrase listed as a part of the name. However, the search system performs a logical OR query and no ranking for best results. So, the first external hard drive in the results I got was at about 10th position only.
The core elements of the site - deals - have a picture with a paragraph which describes the product in short and how to get the deal. Bradsdeals makes a paragraph with this information, while other sites make bulleted points or something like that. Also the deals feature a slightly bigger image than other deal sites and the deals are in a 2 column layout, thereby giving it a look which is not very typical to a deal site.
One thing which is obvious on visiting this site is the high media coverage it has got. The header section shows that this website has been featured in several main stream news media. Also the left column of the home page shows screen grab of Brad Wilson live of some news channel. I am not sure how this website has managed to get so much media coverage, while there is nothing exotic. Surely, this media coverage should have helped them a lot in becoming popular.
Yan’s listing shows that this website is online since Jun’05, which I believe he should have picked up from Alexa. However digging into BradsDeals.com shows that it has actually been online since 2001. It is a known fact that most deal sites created around & before that time period have all become popular and have regular visitors. This answers the question, how come they are one among the popular deal sites?
For me, this is just one other deal site. Just nothing interesting.
