I spend many hours every day on the internet, and I still find a large number of sites that have a horrible design. There are sites that seem to be made for only one resolution, so that if you go there with something other than what the designer thought was the only possible resolution the site looks terrible-images and background skewed off to one side or the other, lines running together in tables or in a forced attempt at some sort of layout.

Then there are the sites that have no idea what colors go with other colors, and give one a page that has a dark background with dark text, so that it is very difficult to make out what the words are on the page. Another problem is all of the sites that have an index page with some sort of flash intro movie, but no choice to skip or even any text to tell you anything about the site so one can decide if it is worthwhile to sit through the movie.

For people with a broadband connection it is only a few seconds (or maybe minutes) before the movie is done, but from listening to people that have dialup connections it is torture to sit there and wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the movie to download and then to find out it is not something that they wanted to watch in the first place.

Another issue that I have come across is trying to contact a company by way of email, or sometimes by breaking down and using the telephone. Many companies make it so difficult to contact them by way of email, they hide the email address or make one click on so many links to get to a form that must be filled out in order to submit a question that most people give up and go away.

There is no reason to make it such an onerous task to contact a company with a question about buying a product or even getting service after buying the product. There is a large company that sells computers and other products that I went to the other day to see about getting a question answered about one of their products that I had purchased some time back. There were so many links to get to where I wanted to be, and then there was a question about a serial number that I did not have the answer to that had to be answered before being able to continue. There was a helpful link on the side to recall your number if need be, so I followed that and filled out that form. Lo and behold, I did not exist in the system! A product that I had purchased direct from the manufacturer, and that from the start they had my name, address, credit card number, the whole ball of wax-and I was not in the system! Not to say the least, I was not impressed with this company, and am now doubtful of making another purchase from them in the future!

L. J. Stroud