I have what seems to be a permanent headache. I have been looking at an incredible range and number of Web applications in the last few weeks, and in this newsletter I'd like to make a plea to all Web applications publishers and developers: Please, please, please check that your product works properly!

If I had a nickel for every time I find a dumb mistake in a Web application I would be insanely wealthy and I wouldn't have a headache. The problem is that most of these mistakes aren’t hard to find.

I’m not thinking about misspellings (as egregious and unforgivable as these are), no I’m thinking about functional problems that just shouldn’t be there. Let me give you an example …

A few days ago I was out and about and a Verizon maintenance truck went past and on its side was an advertisement for Verizon’s FIOS service. Network World’s editor-in-chief has FIOS and he has frequently taunted me with the bandwidth he gets compared to what I get with my comparatively second rate AT&T DSL service. I haven't seen FIOS ads in my town before so I became hopeful that service might now be available in my area, when I got home I went to Verizon’s FIOS site.

On the home page Verizon offers to look up service availability using your Verizon phone number and provides a link to an address look up page if you aren’t already a customer.

Now my address is a little odd as it was only assigned in 2000 (for historical reasons our original address was a quarter mile away, but I finally got tired of schlepping down the road to get my snail mail every day). So I was ready for a problem when I first tried to get the site to look the address up.

The first thing that strikes you about the lookup form is that right up front they aren’t making it easy. They have separate fields for Street#, Directionality (N, S, E, etc.), Street, Apt/Suite, Unit, City, State, and ZIP (why is it that most sites don’t just ask for street and ZIP – looking up city and state from ZIP is about as easy as it gets!).

What is hard to understand is why Verizon would ever opt for anything but the easiest to use interface. Google and scores of other sites can parse one line addresses with consummate ease so why does Verizon have to have so many fields to achieve the same ends?

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.