Moniker.com's new and revamped interface is a disaster
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
Once you update, its hard to make sure you caught every single business rule and weird edge case from your old system and given many of the ccTLD's and gTLD's all have slightly different ways of handling things (.eu domains have no admin contact, .be domains must actually be renewed 30 days before they expire or you lose it) its quite the nightmare and if its a really old system, those tweaks are not evident.
Testing is also quite difficult as the ot&e environments the registries provide are 1) not exactly like their live system 2) require you to create a domain in order to do anything else. So in order to test your new system with actual data, you need to create every single domain in your live system on test. Then issue the commands to put it in exactly the same state as live, however, you cannot mirror a domain perfectly as sometimes its state is set by the registry for legal issues (udrp,etc). It would be much simpler if they just copied live to their sandbox periodically.
I'm not defending them, their launch could have definitely gone much better, but I've been in their shoes and I feel for the tech folks there who are probably spending a lot of late nights at the office and working weekends right now.
One of the reasons we're trying to migrate our rules to a rules engine. They're scattered across pages, Javascript, controllers, services and DAOs...
No one knows all the business rules of the system, not even the BAs.
(In the space as well). I think I would point out here what you are (probably) referring to which may not be obvious to HN readers by "must actually be renewed".
Domains in .com .net .org .info are auto renewed at the registry level.
It's then up to the registrar to delete them if the customer doesn't want the name. With cnoi they have 45 days to do so a grace period that they typically extend to their customers.
I'm assuming (since I'm not familiar with .be in particular) that in that cctld a registrar must proactively renew a name prior to expiration or lose the name.
Edit: fixed gtld to cctld
In .com,.net,.org for example auto renew occurs at 12am the day of expiration. However, for some of the odd ones like .be if you haven't issued a renew command 30 days prior to expiration then its the same as issuing a delete on the day of expiration and have it immediately take effect (normally domains go into pendingDelete status for a limited amount of time before actually being deleted). Also to clarify .be is a ccTLD not a gTLD and so they have a different set of standards and rules as far as ICANN is concerned.
I would love it if all domains would just auto renew by the registry and we'd send the delete command if customers didn't want them. Its what I want for christmas :)
No you don't you want some 2 letter .com's for Christmas.
I was charged for one domain that was not supposed to be renewed (I was transferring it out). Now I have to deal with their abysmal customer services.
To add insult to injury, they posted a half-assed statement on their website and social media accounts and left it at that.
Their previous interface was very simple, sometimes a bit awkward to use but it worked and had no fancy animations,transitions,etc.
Unfortunately it seems that most registrars lack good UX designers. Namecheap's recent re-design is also a mess. They added some fancy sliding menus and animations on top of their old design and made it even more confusing. But at least their system works.
You're not the only one. I was pissed to see my intentionally-expiring domains charged, and the ones I wanted to renew NOT charged(!). Didn't help that the ones I wanted to keep were literally expiring in days, and nobody at Moniker seemed to be responding to tickets. As soon as I find a good alternative, I'm out. This is unacceptable for a business.
Eh, Namecheap didn't really do a redesign (of their service); once you hit the domain management pages it's the same old 1995-looking views embedded in their new layout. It's just the sales funnel pages that changed.
The Namecheap redesign originally struck me as "design for design's sake" and it continues to do so. A bit more than just the front/"funnel" pages, it also impacted some of the menus and the cart and checkout pages.
With regard to the front pages, I found it no improvement. Some form of "Bootstrap-ification" or whatever that served primarily to hide things rather than to expose them -- both to me, a longstanding user, but also I suspect to a fair fraction of new users.
Checkout also was initially more opaque, although that seems to have been improved a bit since then. (Among other things, the first time post-design, finding and renewing an associated "WhoisGuard" registration was a PITA game of hide-and-seek.)
I found the redesign to be yet one more example of what I consider to be the current, mistaken over-influence of "Design" and "Designers". Taking "stuff that works" and "prettying it up" while making it: Harder to actually see; harder to actually use; more bug prone; less responsive (as opposed to "responsive"); etc.
There are plenty of good redesigns. But there are plenty of "redesigns for redesigns' sake" that should be stopped before they are started.
The other day, I heard someone apply the Hippocratic Oath to an element of software/systems design, and I found myself agreeing: "First, do no harm."
In Namecheap's case, I can understand the design to update a distinctly "old school" appearance. But, as has been pointed out, the older design worked. Keeping things working, and clear, should have been a primary -- first -- requirement of the redesign. They didn't fail entirely in that regard, but they certainly annoyed.
Also, the redesign did look more than a bit like someone "slapped" a Bootstrap theme or similar onto the site. Maybe it looks better particularly on phones and tablets than the old site. But I didn't/don't find it particularly attractive. If I'm going to devolve into discussing its "Design", I think they could have done a fair amount better.
Anywho, the site is working, and on the rare occasion when I need customer support, they've always been very responsive via IM (integrated into the site).
Setting Namecheap aside, I hope that "the Web" in general, or at least the parts I care about, can get past this apparent outsized influence of... "Design" (/Craig-Ferguson-dramatic-expression-mode).
P.S. While I'm here, I'll just add: Darn it, Namecheap. "autocomplete off" your credit card security code field!!! You got the message about the credit card number field, but this change remains needed and outstanding (and has carried over through the design change).
I moved most of my stuff to IWantMyName and haven't looked back. Super smooth experience and they add new TLD's often. My initial attraction was .io registration that didn't take a few weeks, but I've since been doing most of my .com/.net/.org registrations there, too.
One day I'll stop being lazy and move everything off GoDaddy over there. :)
You laugh but they actually did this. In realtime. Behold adaptive menus: http://www.ehow.com/facts_7167433_adaptive-menu-windows-offi...
I am personally no user of Windows, but I saw at my customers and none had any issue with it. I guess it had some kind of "speed-up" effect, and was of course customized to each user.
The most recent example of a bad redesign, in my opinion, was Flickr. The new interface is awful and I have actually left the site because of it.
A shame about Moniker BTW. The registrar I've been with since around 2001 has also recently made a mess of things.
http://domainnamewire.com/2014/06/05/moniker-ceo-bonnie-witt...
I hope their goals include long term survival, the way they are going about it I really wonder what sort of 'introduction of new products' would warrant a non-incremental approach like this.
I've moved over a website a few years ago under heavy use (much heavier than monikers ever would see) without the users noticing the switch had even happened.
This was totally uncalled for and plays fast and loose with the moniker brand as well as with the customers who typically depend on moniker to deliver.
The comments section underneath that article is absolutely terrible.
I also noticed that they changed the pricing for privacy from the $1 I've been paying for years to $4. All the reps that got me the pricing are long gone and no one from support has responded to my request to fix the pricing.
I'm nervous to transfer a few hundred domains to a new registrar but given what I'm seeing I don't know how much longer I can tolerate what Moniker is doing.
I would recommend:
www.dynadot.com
www.uniregistry.com
www.namecheap.com
www.pairnic.com
www.dyn.com
www.name.com
That said, they supported SOPA and have been caught in the past redirecting unused subdomains of registered domains. I switched to Namecheap and Gandi.net as a result, but still Pine over Name.com's UI/UX. I rank it up there with Gmail.
I found this, which seems to indicate the opposite: http://www.name.com/blog/general/domains/2011/12/it-aint-abo...
The new interface is awful, too.
Do any registrars have decent interfaces?
Um, they did exactly that when they changed from their traditional menus to the "ribbon." That's when I gave up on MS Office.
i needed to renew a domain, just logged in and dug around in the interface for at least ten minutes and i still can't figure out how to do it. can somebody help me? how can i manually renew a domain right now? not set it to auto-renew but renew it and pay now.
This explains how to renew domains:
http://wiki.moniker.com/index.php/Faq:renewdomain
The credit card I have on file is old so the payment didn't process, but it created an invoice. I was then able to go to 'Payment Options' in the sidebar and click 'PayPal' and then pay the invoice. That renewed the domain instantly (or actually, within about 10 minutes after I received the emails).
Be sure to set all of the domains you don't wish to auto renew to 'delete at expiration' or they'll auto bill your credit card on file. They reset them all to auto renew by default.
Perish the thought!