Most people who register a .md domain do it on nic.md - the official registry, operated by STISC. The service works and has been doing its job for years. But in our view there is room for much better: the registration flow, domain management in your account and the public pages can all be brought up to the level a digital public service deserves in 2026.
So, why not? True to the Academy’s principle - we do not criticise, we look for another approach - we built it.
We do not invent a design. We apply one that already exists.
Here is the interesting part of this study: we did not start from scratch. The Government of the Republic of Moldova already has its own design system - MUD, the Unified Design Model - created for exactly this: so that digital public services look and behave consistently, whatever the institution behind them.
nic.md is operated by a public institution, so aligning with MUD is the natural path: components already defined, accessibility solved at system level, consistency with the rest of the government ecosystem. We applied the system and adjusted it where the specifics of a domain registry called for it - domain search, technical statuses, the payment flow.
It is a lesson that comes up often in this series: sometimes the best design is not the one you draw yourself, but the system you respect.
What we built
Not a one-page mock-up - a working proposal, 17 HTML pages with code, ready to be taken over:
- The registration flow - domain search with alternatives, then 4 clear steps: search → details → payment (MPay / invoice) → confirmation;
- The user dashboard - my domains, domain detail with DNS, nameservers, DNSSEC and transfer, payment and renewal, invoices with history and PDF, account settings;
- The public pages - home page, Whois, about the registry, FAQs by category, authorised resellers, contact and legal notices.
All mobile-first, with fictional data, for demonstration purposes. You can walk through the whole demo: the home page, the registration flow, the user dashboard - or the full map of the proposal (the demo is in Romanian).
The outcome
We sent the proposal to the institution. NIC.MD thanked us; for now it does not fit their current priorities. They remain open for the future - and so do we.
And that is fine. As in 2020, the point of these studies is not the contract - it is to show, concretely and with the code on the table, that there is room for better. The rest comes when it comes.
