Comment: Aggravation begins at home

What are mission statements? What exactly do they mean? I'm asking because I just don't know. But I get the feeling they are terribly important. They must be important because they are on the front page of every other company Web site I have come across.

If I was looking on BT's Web site for its mission statement, I'd find it easily. If, however, I was looking to see how much BT charged its users to have a second phone line installed, I'd face more of a challenge. Most people don't notice the mission statements and never read them. But they are still there. The fact is they are often combined with a host of other information to make most Web sites resemble Jimmy Saville's jewellery box - a collection of eye-searing odds and ends.

The problem lies in the time and effort that companies lavish on such trivia, and the prominence they give to it. This process puts in the background the information that users want, and makes it hard to find.

If every time I was asked a question I ignored it, choosing instead to show holiday photos, operation scars and X-ray dental records, I would start losing friends as well as jobs. But maybe this is unfair: people are not companies, and company Web sites are not human customer-service representatives.

So maybe Web sites are supposed to be like shops. While shopping you might walk around the lighting department of John Lewis, looking for staff. Can you imagine spending 20 minutes looking for them - which is effectively what can happen online. If you were to overturn every lampshade in the shop before finding the grinning sales assistant lurking under a lava lamp, you might be tempted to grab the heaviest lampstand to hand and advance in a threatening manner.

Web sites are set out in such a way that if they were shops, only the mentally deranged would actually enter them. You would need a machete to cut through the lines of advertising hoardings and corporate information. As a shopper, or an information researcher, I don't want such obstacles.

When I go into my bank, I can see information about loans if I actively look for them, but while I am at the till paying in a cheque there isn't a work-experience boy tied to the ceiling, bouncing up and down holding a sign advertising cut-price interest rates, so why on earth would I appreciate similar behaviour online?

Like Alice chasing the White Rabbit, I don't want to run around chasing scraps of information while being bombarded by strangers saying things that don't concern me. I'd like to sit down the rabbit, share a carrot with him, and discuss my problem in plain English. I don't want to feel forced into kicking its little fluffy tail before holding it upside down by its ears over a boiling pan of vegetable broth - but that's the kind of anger that Web sites produce in me.

I don't expect all sites to know what I am looking for when I enter them, but I expect them to consider at least some of my likely wants, and don't-wants. The Internet is a great place to host corporate information, and to explain the beliefs of your company. The home page isn't.

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