<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<opml version="2.0">
<head>
<title>21.opml</title>
<dateCreated>Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:50 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Tom Morris</ownerName>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="Domain name registrar: a simple business plan" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"><outline text="I fucking hate &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.godaddy.com&quot; rev=&quot;vote-for&quot;&gt;GoDaddy&lt;/a&gt;. The site is terrible. It's been designed purposefully with idiots in mind. The pages take what feels like weeks to download, and are so &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommorris/2510899533/&quot;&gt;filled with clutter to be unusable&lt;/a&gt;.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="When a domain name comes up for expiry, they seem to send you an e-mail about every week for the preceding three months telling you that your domain is about to expire. You think to yourself &quot;Fine, I don't need that domain name anymore - I'll just let it expire&quot;. Then you get home to an e-mail from GoDaddy telling you that it isn't going to expire, and that they've renewed it for you and taken the money out of your PayPal. Wait a second. If you are going to renew it for me anyway, why the fuck do you have to send me reminder notices telling me that my domain is about to expire? Make your minds up! If I wanted to renew the domain, I would ahve done it. I know &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; that I needed to have changed the &quot;Auto-Renew&quot; option on the website, but the e-mails were so filled up with crap marketese that this point is not made clear.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="And every time you do anything, they send you this horrible, bloated HTML e-mail telling you that you've changed something. It looks like shite in mutt.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="Every page of their website looks like it was put together by someone different. The domain pages look different from the sales pages, and those look different from the My Account pages. The website is just filled to the brim with pointless shit. In the My Account page, there's all sorts of crap about 'GoodAsGold' - what the fuck is that and why should I care? Ad Credits, AccountExec, Downloads, Buyer Profiles. I don't care. The really hilarious bit is that they even have a thing in the My Account area where you can sign up to be a tester to help improve their 'user experience'. What a joke. As if GoDaddy gives a shit about user experience - their site proves otherwise.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="At the top of the page there are tabs for Domains, Hosting Plans, Site Builders, SSL Certificates, Business, Email, Domain Auctions and Reseller Plans. Each of those has a ton of options underneath them - everything from 'blogcasts' (wtf?) to 'Traffic Blazer' (which sounds very shady and SEOish). Each page must have something like a hundred navigation links. It's a case study in how not to build a website.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="Here's how I'd prefer to have it. You go to a website, login with your OpenID and it'd have two options - &quot;buy domain names&quot; and &quot;manage existing domain names&quot;. That'd be it. To solve renewal, you could do it in a few simple ways - have it so that people can get a periodic e-mail telling them when their domains are expiring and how to renew them, or you could get an RSS/Atom feed listing all the changes to your account, or maybe an iCal feed. When you buy the domain, it should ask you whether you want the site to auto-renew it, and if you do, how you want to pay for it. If you don't want to auto-renew it, maybe in the e-mail it should have a link that you can click that does very quick renewal. It should be no harder than clicking the link, logging in (OpenID, again) and pressing &quot;Renew&quot;.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="They'd have a really simple API so you could have widgets and gadgets and all those kind of nice things so you could see what's going on with your domain names. Each domain would be accessible by going to a URI path like &quot;/domains/tommorris.org/forwarding&quot; or &quot;/domains/tommorris.org/renew&quot;, and there'd be a really simple, well-designed, clean web page that'd show you all the options.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="And it would only do one thing - domains. No hosting or e-mail or SSL certificates or Quick Blogs or BlogCasts or TrafficWhiz or whatever the fuck the latest thing that cosmically inconsequential SEO types want. Just let me buy and manage domain names with no fuss. If GoDaddy is the Enterprise Java Bean, I want the equivalent of the well-crafted bash script.&#13;" created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/><outline text="If such a site exists, please tell me. I'm really fed up with GoDaddy. It's cheap, and it looks it. I have no time for poorly designed websites anymore. If your site sucks, I will stop using it. That is all there is to it." created="Wed, 21 May 2008 16:29:51 GMT"/></outline></body>
</opml>
