England to Win the World Cup&maybe.

Supporting the England Football team is staggeringly problematic. Loyalty is indeed a valuable currency and an utterly admirable characteristic; that said, some circumstances invariably arise which are clearly designed to test such honorable estates. For some, it is the insufferable traffic in London which irks their already weary soul; for others it can be nothing more than a publican having to change a keg prior to serving their favourite tipple that encourages their ire.

Naturally, my own personal patience threshold sits atop a much more lofty apex and is rarely displaced from that all-seeing perch. Step forward the England football team. Every four years (which is how often the festival of football, the World Cup, is enacted) the fine country of England holds its collective breath and morphs into the Land of Hope and Glory. Flag waving, face-painting, borderline jingoistic song-singing insanity reigns supreme, much like Britain did in the heady days of the Empire. Foolish, unrequited, incredulous, irrational, specious, cockamamie and preposterous optimism flows through every English man, woman, child, cat, and dog.

Having explained myself in what I hope is a manner defined by clarity and imbued with subtle dignity, I shall now proceed to highlight the perennial problem. Pure, unbridled anticipation and confidence always turns into the ultimate disappointment and inconsolable disenchantment when England suffer defeat. Somehow, this inevitable failure seems to be a surprise, even though it occurs with monotonous regularity. Still, the pain is real. Losing in a game that has its spiritual home in the motherland is never easy; in fact, it is agonizing, arduous, biting, burning, saddening, stinging, tedious, tormenting, hard, harrowing, vexatious and nothing short of grievous&especially when it is to one of our eternal footballing foes, Argentina or Germany.

This raw collection of feelings can trouble different people for different reasons. In the world of Internet marketing and web optimization, you will unearth these emotions whenever you ask a usability expert to analyze a sub-standard website. For every dazzling, daring, fabulous, fantastic, magnificent, marvelous, sensational and stupendous online destination, you will find a plethora of sites that seem to consider usability a devalued currency, that which should be ignored.

It is hard to overstate how wrong, how utterly misguided and how fiscally damaging ignoring usability can be. Your average web user is no longer an imbecile to be treated with contemptuous disdain; these days, your site is likely to be frequented by educated, discerning, expectant online devotees. As such, it is imperative to deliver and maintain the highest possible standards of usability without exception.

So spare me a thought as I watch England blunder, bumble, flounder, fluff, totter and limp through the rounds of the World Cup, hopefully displaying an occasional lapse into brilliance. Spare me a thought as my boyish enthusiasm turns into ultimate disappointment, a tradition I would he happy to discard with alacrity.

For those who ignore usability on their website with the same flagrant abandon that England eschew fine footballing skills, beware of the results. Failure may be painfully inevitable for those overpaid prima donnas with three lions on their shirt, but usability is as achievable as it is desirable. Jolly good then, come on Blighty and heres to another four years of waiting&Goodnight one and all.