Log in to the Telenor Pakistan website, and you are greeted by a huge—yes, annoyingly oversized—banner/flash ad that fills up nearly one third of the screen. If that’s not enough, one has the further option of clicking to find two more Telenor ads-of-the-day—once they all eventually finish loading, of course. In Pakistan, where many customers do not have wireless Internet capabilities and must rely on dial-up connections, this is a profound oversight.

The visitor then has a choice to either go to the Prepaid, Postpaid or Corporate sections of the website. This straight forward choice is one of the rare thoughtful and user-friendly elements within the site. Otherwise, there seems to be an over-reliance on Flash-based content and general glitziness. Rather than concentrating on giving the visitors what they want in terms of useful information and technological simplicity, the website veers off into unnecessary bells and whistles that—while presumably designed to impress visitors—is hardly consumer-oriented. One is left with the thought that developers took the "contemporary" persona of Telenor too much to heart, and in an attempt to give the site a modern and flashy feel, have neglected the needs of existing and prospective customers.

The overindulgence in non-static content is most evident when one clicks on to the Postpaid section, and an entire Flash-based page loads. You can forget about logging on to this section with your mobile Internet, unless you have a Symbian phone or a BlackBerry. If the visitor is patient enough to bear with the goings on for a bit longer, then there is some reward, as options become available to learn about various services and packages being offered by Telenor.

Also, the developers seem to have lost focus on the core reasons why visitors actually access the site: to either compare or understand various packages and rates, to find out about various value added services for a particular package, to locate a convenient outlet for buying a selected connection, or in my case, to access one’s account’s billing information online. None of these important options are easy to find, and this makes the website largely hollow and frustratingly useless.

All in all, even though the website proudly features a fashionable and glitzy look, it is sadly out of touch with the customers it is supposed to value. To put it simply, Telenor's website is not very intuitive, and for a company that specializes in communication, this is inexcusable, even ironic. What Telenor seems to have forgotten is that an online presence is not just a strategy for further marketing and advertising; their website is an important informational and functional service that should be held accountable for not doing the appropriate research and outreach needed to understand both the current state of Pakistani communication services and its consumers' needs and technological capacities.

Telenor may be one of the better telecom brands in Pakistan, but its website has a long way to go before it establishes a positive association in the visitors' minds.