Copacetic

I registered a domain for a mate today. It had to be a .ie domain and even though I am a .ie conscientious objector I will perform the act for friends in need.

Blacknight.ie has good hosting offers for low-end users and they are an accredited .ie registrar and are cheaper (by 50%) than direct registration.

Unfortunately their order Wizard has one nasty bug which must be loosing them a lot of business. On the page below, you are expected to enter a county. 

 Its highlighted in red, but the workflow happily lets you proceed and fill in a pretty heavy duty multi-part form later on in the workflow. It then complains that the county is missing but there is nowhere to fill in the county at that point. Very confusing.

On the plus side, I rang up blacknight.ie and their support desk spotted the problem immediately and were able to indicate the fix. Still I had to rekey all the registration, address and VISA content again.

Two simple fixes are apparent here. Either, stop the user proceeding at the above screen (why do you need the county at this point anyway, you could just remove this field) or allow them to add the county when putting in the rest their address.

I would guess many people abandon the cart and this point and head somewhere else for a solution.

If ISPs (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions) supported a REST API to DNS then applications like Google For Domains wouldn’t have to throw users to the wolves when it comes to configuring CNames and aliases.

Instead you could just give your credentials to Google and they could update your DNS entries directly. Most ISPs discourage direct fiddling with users DNS entries (for good reasons), but with the ability to customise your URL now a feature of Google for Domains, the need for non-skilled users to access this data is becoming more important.