F*ck I Hate GoDaddy!

The BBQ Pit
1

I long ago settled on GoDaddy as my registrar of choice - best of a bad lot, since it stopped being all NetSol - but Christ on a pogo stick, can their site send my blood pressure soaring. They rearrange, prettify and “improve” it about once a week and it continues to be one of the most confusing, misleading and badly organized sites I know.

Important stuff is buried in tiny side menus while the GREAT BIG BUTTONS are for nearly useless circular navigation. Gawd 'elp ya if you go down a wrong tree, where DOMAINS doesn’t mean what you think it does and there’s no way to get to the DOMAINS list you’re trying to access. Pack a lunch to get through all the Fuh-rendly Bouncy Popup Menus to get to the core management screens… and then one wrong click and you’re back in Fuh-rendly Land again, wandering until you find the actual management screens once more.

I am trying to move a half-dozen domains to a new account, and besides that being a tedious, fraught process with multiple steps of initiate and confirm and wait and confirm the email notice… on both ends of the transaction… but the wonky, wandering, flat out shitty interface makes it much more difficult. I got an email from the new account side that had four or five carefully written steps… and they didn’t match the actual menus and screens through the process. I finally found “Accept Emailed Changes” on ANOTHER menu, as one of the tiny text-only, “you don’t really want to click on me” options hidden in a corner.

It boggles me that such a large, high-traffic, high-profile net entity could have such a truly awful, unusable, enraging interface. It’s like trying to make a server farm management console appeal to people who don’t know what a computer is.

2

Cool rant. I agree with everything you say. I used to deal with a lot of domains, and I would want to do things like change namerservers as efficiently as possible. Godaddy was constantly changing their menu, and naming things close to what you were looking for, so you clicked on another service they would sell. All I want to do is find the damned domain manager!

I heard Craig Ferguson on Sirius Radio do an add for Godaddy. They will evidently make your business successful with all their helpful advice, that’s funny.

3

Computing and tech has been going down the road of ‘Don’t touch a thing, you awful awful person: just take it as we in our perfection have decreed.’ for some time now, and revolting interfaces may be designed to prevent use. Certainly DreamHost, although admirable as cheap hosts, have the most vile fronts of any, changing a year or so back to the wholly hideous and incompetent Flat Style — Metro, Unity, Swiss Style etc. – of slabs; unlike the better hosts UrlJet, which is unchanged — and still readable.
Neatest of all are my choice of registrars the sober and unflashy NameAlerts: I’m pretty sure they haven’t changed their site since they started in 2002, by the looks of it and* it just works.*
As the good old anti-advertising proverb goes, ‘Good Wine needs no Bush’.