Poor web page design of "My Vodafone" (Australia)

I tried to report this very bad page design about a year ago, and it was only today when I revisited Vodafone Australia's "My Vodafone" home page that I found it unchanged.

I'm not surprised, actually. This is just another case of some combination of poor web page design, woeful usability testing, weak project management, who knows what. Apparently it was done by an external web design firm. Vodafone shouldn't have paid for this. As one of the very early Vodafone Australia customers from around 1994 or so, I'm quite disappointed about it, really. (Those responsible for creating and releasing this weak page design should get a rap across the knuckles!

(Click to view a larger image)

When I first opened this page soon after "My Vodafone" was launched, I kept clicking on various parts of the central area of the page (in the image, surrounded by a thick black line), this to me seeming to be the natural thing to do for a page laid out like this. To my annoyance, this central part of the page was entirely "dead" (no active hyperlinks whatsoever), and despite my fault report still is a year or more later. The only live parts are restricted to the navigator column on the left.

This page would make an excellent discussion point (as a bad example) in Jakob Nielsen's book: Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed