So I have just visited the website of a major West End hotel. And in short, the experience was terrible. Terrible but not surprising. The hotel is a boutique hotel, styled on an art gallery, and so most of the thought that had gone into the website was to make it a clever, continually animating, over engineered experience, closer to a pop-video than a useful, informative hotel website.

So far so terrible.

I only wanted a phone number for the restaurant. That's all. And could I find it? No. It was maddening. Just maddening. In the end I Google'd the hotels name+telephone number and found it another site. I then phoned them to find that despite it being 11.00am, the 'answerphone' told me that they didn't open until 10.00am (eh?) and that I should leave a message and someone would get back to.

And here's where we all site up straight and learn the lesson. Because this sort of usability failure is just inexcusable in this day.

Despite being a self-confessed techie, I still prefer a telephone number to confirm things like restuarant and hotel bookings. THat's just my preference. I still like to talk to people and ask questions and get answers right away. And so do a lot of people, a lot of people who won't be staying or eating at this hotel. So where is the phone number? I am also acutely aware that a lot of people will stay at this hotel as the arty-farty website will appeal hugely to them, and they will probably make the booking that I do not, but they won't do it online as it is maddeningly complicated and offers no confirmation print-out, email, or anything to provide a booking reference. And don't try to phone them for one as they are all out according to the answerphone.

But even that is not the real reason for this rant. The real reason is that when your online offering fails, as it will do from time to tim depsite your best efforts. This hotel clearly has budget to improve their offering, but you may be a small enterprise that doesn't. You uite possibly know better than this hotel as to how they should be doing things, and how you would dearly love to market your bed and breakfast, shop, church or mobile hairdressing serice, but you don't have technical expertise enough to take online orders or reservations. Never mind all of that. Just ensure that your offline service makes up for it. That is so vital I cant begin to tell you. The hotel failed to take my reservation online, and failed offline. 0 out of 2. Nil Point. Zip. It would not have been hard for them to call me back. It would not have been difficult for them to have routed my call back to the desk rather than to an answerphone (it's a hotel, people are always working) and it wouldn't have been hard for the answerphone to have offered an email address, the email address so impossble to find on the website. But nothing. Insane.

So there you have it. So many easy wins are just that - easy. Forget them at your peril!