Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Infinite loop


I've got home DSL service through CenturyTel. Its a simple 1.5MB/sec DSL service and I went to their website to see if they offer faster services in my area. I'm close to the local DSLAM so distance won't kill my speed.

Their website has some decent flash animations on it but it has a fatal flaw that put me into an infinite loop no matter how I searched for availability of ANY type of DSL service for my area. The logic on the website says that before I can even see what's available, I need to upgrade my current line to have their voice service on it. Their assumption is that 1) I'm a current customer and 2) that I'm logged into their website as a customer. Once you are in the loop, they have a persistent cookie that will always return a "service not available" no matter what you do on the website.

Being that I own a company in the website creation/design/maintenance business, I'm simply appalled that a website can exist out there with such simple logic problems in its functionality.

I can't imagine its doing much good for their business either.

When is the last time you used your own website like a customer would? How about a new customer? What if the visitor to your website didn't know any of the terminology or industry lingo thats so obvious to you? Have you checked you input fields to see how they handle bad data or malicious attempts to submit SQL queries?

(yes, there's irony in the photo...what is it?)

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