The site itself is quite well designed - albeit a little cluttered in places. When accessed from an Xtra dial-up account, it certainly seems to run quickly which is another bonus.

I suspect there's still quite a bit of "finishing off" work to be done behind the scenes though. For instance, on this page it states that results of a search will be ordered by:

• Those with Display Pages
• Those with Web Site links
• Those with Headlines
• Non-enhanced listings

I also noticed that the Java applet on the front page doesn't seem to work and that the Java directory has been left open to inspection. This doesn't pose a security problem or anything but it's still a good idea to turn off access to this directory.

There is talk of Directories adding a national email address directory to its site some time soon. I certainly hope they allow people to "opt-out" of such a list since in most cases it becomes rather trivial for mass-marketers to extract such addresses and use the results as a mailing list for unsolicited commercial email.

Price-wise I wonder if it's really worth nearly $40 per month (including GST) to have your company name and a link to your Website added to the Telecom Internet Yellow Pages. This is more than most smart people pay to host their entire Web site.

I guess their sales staff are still playing catch-up because I could not for the life of me find a single site that had any "display pages" associated with it.

But who has enough confidence to buy a listing with a pointer to their own Web site - or even a listing for that matter.

Try searching for the following:

• Xtra
• Webmasters

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