OT: Poor Web Design

[Fairlight]

So, due to a freak of nature, I'm actually away from home.  I have with my
my dinky Digital HiNote VP laptop with 14.4 modem.  This model was so early
that even though it's a P100 with 32MB, it has no UARTS capable of letting
any of the higher speed modems work.  The Xoom 14.4 is the highest I ever
got to work, and not for lack of trying.

So I'm at a hotel here, and there's a nice jack by the desk for modem
users.  Kind of them.

I decide it's a wise idea in this particular situation to forward my calls
from home to my cell.  So, I think, just look it up on BellSouth.com.
Yeah, right.  :)  All I want is simple instructions that take 3 lines,
right?

I had fired up PuTTY and loaded 8K worth of screens, if that.  After
getting partway through loading the second or third page at BellSouth as
the next thing I did, my modem icon in systray reads 87K uploaded, 520K
downloaded!

FOR TWO PAGES!!!

Granted, this is an aged piece of equipment.  But when it takes 2 minutes
to load a simple page from them, and I can load my homepage in 10 seconds
or so, there's something amiss with web design in this industry.

And no, I don't think this laptop would handle a WiFi card, nor do I think
this hotel actually support it anyway.  Point is--you make do with what you
have, and companies that make it impossible to use anything the latest
state-of-the-art equipment are just idiotic.  I'd have tried lynx if I
didn't already know their site was heavily client-side-scripting
reliant...most things wouldn't be usable under lynx.

My tie-in to fP?  None.  Other than that their web site loads in a mere 30
seconds--a large part of that due to the big fP 5.0 banner image.  The rest
is clean as you'd want.

My main reason for posting this is to remind business people to make sure
their sites are clean and concise if at all possible.  If I had a choice,
I'd drop BellSouth after that fiasco.  Alas, I don't.

mark->
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