So, I have been in my new apartment for a few months almost now, and as such, I am beginning to receive various invoices for living there: electricity, water…
As a side node, for EDF, I did not have any trouble, I did everything by phone when setting it up, with the nicest person I ever had the pleasure to speak to for this kind of things. Just perfect. If I could have this power, I would immediatly ask for a raise for her.
As for general des eaux. Well, I was a bit lazy and sent too late the paper for automatic payment, so I got another invoice. Looking at the paper, I see that I can (try to) pay online. So, being nowadays a Mac user at home, I open my ibook and fireup Safari with the URL of their site: Générale des Eaux and what do I see? A blank page. blink, blink. I go through google, just in case I mistyped the URL. Blank page. Ok, dumb web agency, part 1. Fire up firefox. Same result. Dumb web agency, part 2. Fire up Opera, identify as IE, same result. Dumb web agency, part 3.
I’m a software developer. I used to be a system administrator. I worked in the IT field for 7 years by now, and I wrote my share of web pages, static, dynamic. Perl, C++, Java, whatever. HTML 2, 3, 4, XHTML transitional, Strict, Javascript. After all of this, I thought we were in 2006.
How wrong was I! We’re still in 2000, and the Generale des Eaux (or whichever web agency is behind “this”) is still writing dumb web pages, startup-like, that can’t be read anywhere but on the desktop of the people who wrote these pages. I don’t want to try to look at what they wanted to produce. I have already seen frames, javascript writing (dumb) HTML and Flash; Enough for me in this case.
I tried to write a mail for webmaster@generale-des-eaux.com but only got an error reply. Only way to contact them is through their web site. Dumb. So, I’m a brave and nice guy, I find a lonely Windows XP pc at work, use it through rdesktop, fire up IE and try to use it to send them a mail. And at first, it won’t even work because there are using pop-up everywhere, and this IE was blocking them. Gargl!
Maybe the Generale des eaux ought to learn from what OpenWeb has to say, for example.