The Incomprehensible Failure That Is ScottishPower's Website

Executive summary: do not under any circumstances sign up as an online customer with ScottishPower. If terrorists burst in and demand that you sign up, threatening you with death otherwise, take the bullet.

Why? It's the website. ScottishPower's gas and electricity are perfectly good, and i'm sure they're lovely people, but their website is a failure, and when you're an online customer, that's a problem.

Let's have a little run-down of the problems, shall we? And let's give them a star (ie asterisk) rating - two stars for showstoppers, one for major inconveniences, and none for merely highly irritating features.

• [**] Web server is often unreachable. When i tried to log in one evening, i got nothing - 'net reset error', Firefox told me; never seen that before. Pings vanished into the ether; a telnet to port 80 would open, but abort if you tried to send anything down it. It did come up a bit later, and let me log in but then went silent again when i tried to give it a meter reading - that timed out and i had to start the whole thing all over again (which is not easy - see below). Another timeout happened later. Two timeouts in the course of paying one bill; this is not an exceptional case. I realise they have to cut costs, but how about connecting to the internet with something a bit more robust than A PAIR OF BAKED-BEAN TINS AND A LENGTH OF STRING?
• [] Login page opens as a popup from the home page. This is completely unnecessary, but a very common element of web 'design'. I can only assume their web designers do not actually use the web themselves.
• [**] Users can neither log in or get into the site if already logged in. So, If you're logged in but lose your place on the site (eg when - not if - a connection times out, and a reload takes you back to the login page), you're fucked; you can't start again and log in, and there are no links leading into the working pages of the site. Empirical evidence hints that a second attempt to log in when already logged in will kill the previous login. Without then logging you in, of course - that requires a third login.
• [*] Website is inconsistent with email directions. The emails they send out to remind you to give a reading say "Simply click on http://www.scottishpower.co.uk and log onto the site. Select 'my account', which leads you through to 'my energy account details'. Click on 'calculate bill' to submit your meter readings.". Sounds good. However, if you have an outstanding balance (as you often will if you pay by constant monthly direct debit), then when you do log in, there's no 'calculate bill' link; there's a 'recalculate' link, which i think does the same thing, but it's not at all obvious from the context. To even get to that link, i have to follow 'view outstanding bill'.
• [] No bills by email, no plain text bills. You have to log in and read the bill on screen. The bill is crudely-formatted text, presented in a <pre> element; there is, however, no way to get just the text, or even a page with less 'design' cruft. There's a 'print this page' option, but that does actually print something, rather than giving you a printable version.
• [*] Website is basically just very badly designed. Everything about it makes it a challenge to understand what they mean and what you're supposed to do - the phrasing, the layout, everything..
• [] Nonsensical messages. "If you have just recently applied to become a ScottishPower customer, input your opening meter readings by clicking here.". Surely they know i've been a customer for six months, and have already paid a bill? "This bill is due and payable now.". I pay by monthly DD; how can a bill be payable? I don't pay individual bills!
• [*] There are no words for this. "Please note: You may see a white screen for up to 10 seconds while we retrieve your account information.". Fair play, i've never had to wait that long, but this is just idiotic.
• [] Inappropriate fixed-width layout. The whole website appears inside a box in a giant, blank turquoise field; the box is not quite big enough for some of the pages, notably those where there is preformatted text (and there are a lot of those - all the bill details are like this, output from some sort of legacy system, perhaps). I shouldn't have to scroll right to see the totals column.
• More to come - probably next time i have to give a meter reading

Verdict: monkeys. This website is simply gratuitously bad. I honestly do not understand how any human being could create a website this bad. The only explanation is that they used monkeys. Retarded monkeys.