The hopeless case of GoDaddy brevity

GoDaddy has been known for its horrible website for a long time now.  Anyone who has ever hosted a domain with them, knows how counter-intuitive, cluttered, and noisy that website is.  But there was still a little hope that one day they will realize this and maybe, just maybe throw 99.99% of all that junk out of the window.

Today I lost that hope.

Why?  Because I received a reminder email from GoDaddy.  A few of my domains are expiring soon, and GoDaddy kindly reminds me that I need to renew them.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Maybe.  But you better take a look.  Here is a screenshot of the HTML email that I received – a couple of places are blurred by me, and a couple of other places are highlight with red lines – those indicate the useful bits in this email.

If you can’t find the markings, I’ll tell you.  There are exactly two of them.  One is in the second half of the message subject, the half that is not really visible on the mobile or some other small screen.  The useful bit is the one that says “You have domains expiring!”.  The second bit is in one of those boxes around the middle of the message.   Titled with “Items expiring” and with content of just “Domain names: yes”.

There!  None of the actual expiring domain names is mentioned.  Nor is the date of the expiry.  If you want to find out anything more than that, click on the “Renew now” button, visit the GoDaddy website, login, navigate to your domains, and then see what needs to be done.

The rest of this email is absolutely useless junk!  I mean, they can literally take it all out and throw it away, leaving just “You have domains expiring! Click here to visit the GoDaddy website and find out more.”

Usually I don’t really pay attention to GoDaddy emails, but today I did.  And when I realized how much junk is there, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  So I looked through it a few more times, just being extra careful that I haven’t missed much.

Apparently I did.  For those people who’s email client does not render HTML emails properly, and for the mobile phone folks, GoDaddy provided a link to the mobile version of this email.  There I was, thinking that now they would nail it.

And they didn’t.  Here is the screenshot I took after navigating to the mobile version link.

I have to say that indeed it is a shorter, lighter version of the HTML email.  But once again, it misses the point completely.  This one doesn’t even tell you why you are reading all this text.  And to add insult to injury, the thing that they tell you to click (“My Account”) is not actually clickable, even though a few other elements in the message are.

I hope, now you understand why I lost hope in GoDaddy ever improving its website and its email communications.  Brevity is the soul of wit, said a wise man.  But, I guess, GoDaddy never heard the saying.

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