Help is 14 clicks away

An organisation whose website I visit frequently runs a helpdesk for computing problems. That's fairly usual in most organisations but what is somewhat surprising about this one is the fact that they keep their contact details such a well kept secret. I know their phone number; I have the page it's on bookmarked, but having heard others were having trouble finding it, I decided to see for myself just how hard it was to locate on the organisation's website.

Here's what I had to do:

1. Read a 1 page introduction.
   
2. Read a 20 page guide. IT Support and Working with Computers is mentioned by page 11 but the helpdesk isn't mentioned until page 14, so a new user might not yet know it exists.
   
3. Click the Getting help and support link mentioned in the guide.
   
4. Click Computing Helpdesk.
   
5. Click Computing Guide.
   
6. Click Home. People new to the site may have trouble finding this. It doesn't explain where to find the ever so small link.
   
7. Click the Support Tab.
   
8. Scroll down; the Your Computer section is off the end of the page.
   
9. Click Computing Guide
   
10. Go back to Step 4 to find out where to go next - it isn't obvious.
    
11. Return to Computing Guide, if I could still remember how.
    
12. Click Getting Started.
    
13. Click Computing Helpdesk.
    
14. Click Contact Details - finally!
    

One of the key usability principles of websites is that navigation through them should be made easy. It shouldn't be this hard to find details for a helpdesk and I would hope that any organisation that recognised itself in this real scenario would take steps to tackle the problem very quickly. Actually, long before step 14, I'd decided Google would have been quicker, but a real new user might well have given up. Do they have to make it so hard?