Yet another website gripe

Yesterday I was on about websites that take too long to load. I've got a new gripe today - unfortunately triggered by the same site that I gave up on yesterday!

And here it is - websites that don't actually do anything useful.

I'm back at trying to access a user list via the slow-loading website. Having cached itself as far as graphics and look & feel go, it's now loading a bit faster. However, the information I'm looking for, which is obviously being pulled out of a database somewhere - well, isn't. There's no information appearing on the screen.

This isn't the first time it's happened. Two months ago we contacted the customer support bloke to inform him of this, and he passed things on to the IT blokes, and then we waited. Eventually we had to go to insistant mode - I took to emailing him a "please confirm receipt of this message" on the hour, every hour - and after two days he caved :-) We at least got a reply out of him. It still took numerous phonecalls to get things fixed.

Except it seems they actually weren't. The site is still trying to pull information unsuccessfully, making it completely and utterly useless.

Seen those kinds of websites? They either send you around in endless circles of "click here for..." or throw up "page not found". Perhaps they do look useful at first - but finding anything you need is basically impossible, whether it's contact details or a product price. They're simply not content-functional. They don't work.

You can have all the bells and whistles you want, you can pare it down to lean and mean, you can have it functioning efficiently - but if it's not providing what it's supposed to provide, it's just a waste of bandwidth.