Burgesses is safe and sound
POST MAGAZINE - 11TH JANUARY 2002
This website sells online mortgage payment protection insurance to people who are worried they may no longer be able to pay for their houses because of illness and the like. The site looks fine with a few neat tricks to liven the thing up.
A menu on the left-hand side takes you to all the interesting things. The pricing is a bit odd. Joint cover costs exactly twice that of individual cover. This may seem logical, but it makes you wonder why they bother quoting joint cover if there’s no incentive whatsoever in taking it out. I don’t know what was going on under the “press coverage” section, because whenever I tried clicking on it, my computer crashed. But elsewhere, the site worked as it should.
There’s a “lighter” section full of cartoons, which did not make me laugh at all.
The most important section is the online buying. This is a suitably long form that uniquely starts by asking for your address rather than your name. there seem to be some areas of what we in publishing call creative white space for no apparent reason, but it’s not difficult to fill in. the form does not appear to generate a policy dynamically and the error checking is not sophisticated. As a way of gathering information, this form is fine – if cluttered.
One final note: the “expert opinion” section quotes a former PM employee as saying the site’s “excellent”. Let’s see what quotes they take from this review.
