Address handling deficits [General]
12:21pm BST, 10 Apr 2009

Dear web developers and people who commission websites aimed at a UK audience,

It would make my life easier if everyone who created forms for entering postal addresses on websites spent some time thinking about where people actually live. Many of you seem to think that we all live in addresses that look this:

22 Acacia Avenue
Smalltown
Burbshire
XX9 9ZZ

This is simply not the case.

A few specific tips for people to consider:

• In common with most of the 7.5 million residents of London, I do not live in a county. Do not make county a mandatory field. Do not add "Greater London" to the selection of values. It isn't a county, it's a workaround for your broken assumptions about the way the UK is administered.
• Technically, the residents of Portsmouth, Southampton and other unitary authorities do not live in a county either and have not done since 1992. I repeat, do not make county a mandatory field.
• For much of my time in London, I have lived in houses converted into flats. These are typically distinguished by number or letter. Please have some facility for entering the flat number or letter. Please do not only have a field for house number and then validate that it only contains a single number and no letters. Living in the same building as someone does not imply that I would like to share my post with them.
• Postcodes are more complicated than you think. Do not write your own postcode validation rules. "EC1R 3ER" is a valid postcode. If you choose to use someone else's validation rules, please ensure that you have some way of finding out when the Royal Mail issues new postcodes which break the existing validation rules.
• If the postcode I enter is not in your database of postcodes, it might mean that it is a new postcode that hasn't made it into your database yet. You are updating your postcode database, right? Please allow me to enter a postcode that isn't in your database, after warning me.

In essence, please do not waste my time trying to validate that my address adheres to your fundamentally broken view of the way the UK works.

Update: Fixed a typo.

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