John, it's far more than a question of the initial operational issues. Approaching this simply from a standpoint of evaluating a website, there's a balance that most good web shops will strike between simplicity and content reward, and this one fails badly. That's an area completely separate from the issues and questions about whether they properly accounted for the load

Re: your thinly veiled attack yesterday about use of skills (Mike B, thanks for your reply), over the last few years one of the things client have been asking me to do as a "side service" is sit back and look at new (or legacy) systems with a fresh eye. They know they're too close to it, and they just want that third set of eyes because they are confident they'll get some perspective that provide benefits ranging from incremental to game-changing. It's not rocket science, there are plenty of smart people on this forum who could also do it. It is (among other things) a matter of completely putting yourself in the head of a user.

In my opinion, they could have gone a different direction with the entire interface to make it more engaging. Even obvious things, like making certain information available BEFORE going through the enrollment process, would make this a better site. Other thing, like not doing certain validations until multiple pages later, are going to be annoying to many people.

In some ways, they wrote this for a toddler and went overboard. I would bet you ten bucks that thought resonated with them when they built this. That's not a good way to approach a system. So I'm bold enough to say, yes, if I had actually "been in the room" with these developers and web architects, I (and others here) have some skills and experience that could have made this a better web interface than it is.

God only knows what they're doing in the database....



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