As web designers we spend a large portion of our time struggling to make the websites we build render the same in different browsers. It is a thankless task, but it is usually demanded by clients, who desire a consistent 'brand experience', or some similarly wrenching phrase, across different platforms. And why wouldn't they? 

Recently, the more sensible browsers (basically all of them except the paleolithic Internet Exploder) have introduced a range of new capabilities broadly known as CSS 3. This includes better alpha transparency, dynamic rounded corners, programmable shadowing and so on. You'll just have to take it from me that giving things rounded corners before this happened was tedium itself. Drop-shadows were possible with dismal hacks, transparency often simply wasn't.

The world's first website was launched almost 20 years ago, and there are more than 250 million of them today, but why are so many of them so painfully difficult to use? As an internet user I am driven to distraction by lazy interface design, poor visual communication and ill-designed websites; it seems that here in Hong Kong things are particularly bad.

I imagine that you, like me, are familiar with the following miserable scenario. You are online and trying to book tickets or buy flowers or find someone's phone number. Your time, like mine and everyone else's, is extremely precious. You have found a website which seems to offer what you need, but after a quick click around your hopes are dashed. You can't find the information you need. You can't work out how to place your order. You can't even find your way back to the homepage. So you give up. You pick up the phone, fill in and fax an order form, dispatch a carrier pigeon or a camel train or do whatever else it is that people did before everything became so horribly difficult, sometime in the nineties.