As Sitemorse grows throughout the year you may have missed the introduction of one or more new features to our site, check below to see what we've been working on.

Monday, 15th August 2011: We have today enhanced Sitemorse Snapshot by including the results from the Spelling module in the Snapshot report.

All Sitemorse users have unlimited access to run Instant Snapshot on any website, running our full range of tests, checks and measures on the page in only a few seconds. If your subscription includes the Spelling module then any time you test a page on a site covered by this subscription (for example your own home page) we will include the results of the Spelling module in the Snapshot.

The Spelling icon displays a green tick if all the words visible on the page, the page metadata and any accessibility "alt" text was found in the relevant language dictionaries or your own custom word list.

If one of more words are unknown to us a red cross is displayed. Clicking this icon presents a list of the unknown words and a snippet of context. Users with Snapshot Developer edition are also told the line number of the source code and the HTML tag the word was found in.

If the word is correct, such as a company name or part of internal terminology you can click the add button to add it to your default custom word list. Following this decision future tests of the same site will ignore the word.

This enhancement is also available for any standard Sitemorse report. Each time we check a site for you (including weekly audits, adaptive page monitoring and ad hoc testing) we store the Snapshot of the page. Spelling results will now be included in the Snapshot window.

Monday 9th May 2011: In response to feedback we have expanded and simplified the way we display broken links in the Function area of a Sitemorse report.

The new page layout is designed to be clearer to first time users which page is broken and which page(s) needs attention. As well as telling you the HTML tag and link content we now also include the line number. In the case of a PDF file we will now tell you which page on the PDF that the link was found on.

Many of you have been using Snapshot for some time to locate and fix broken links. So we've made this even easier by giving you direct access to the Snapshot - both Page and Source view - next to each broken link. Just click the blue icon to locate the problem link on your own, familiar, page.

One change our advanced users will notice is that previously if a broken link was found on the same page more than once we reported it just once (both errors were counted in calculating your Sitemorse score). This caused a little confusion when thinking you'd corrected the error when only one had been fixed. To resolve this we now list each individual broken link, together with the line number, tag name and content and Snapshot views.

Monday 6th December: We have this week rolled out a couple of small changes to the cookies testing in Sitemorse. The first change is very simple and straightforward - to help users repair reported problems, the diagnostic messages will now include the name of the problematic cookie.

The second change is that, while we still report errors found with cookies, the testing system will now accept the faulty cookie, and send its value with subsequent requests that are part of the same test. This should help alleviate the situation where the web server being tested sees that the cookie has not been accepted, and repeatedly attempts to set it with every request - leading to hundreds of diagnostic messages about the same cookie.

Thursday 11th November 2010: We have released an update to the Sitemorse engine to permit underscores at the start of IDs in XHTML.

For example the following code is now permitted on a page declared as XHTML:

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value="..." />

Pages with code similar to the above and declared as HTML will see the following Code quality diagnostic failure:

'file/html/badvalue - "__VIEWSTATE" is not a valid value for attribute "id" to tag "input".'

September 2010: We have enabled Snapshot for all Sitemorse audits. Our Snapshot service stores the exact HTML and files returned by your web server. When viewing your report you can call up a 'Page' or 'Source' view. Page view redraws the page exactly as it appeared when Sitemorse scanned your site. Along the top of the page our control panel allows you to enable one or more diagnostic categories, boxes are then drawn around each failure, simply mouse over the failing item to see the details.

Meanwhile Source view displays the HTML with syntax highlighting and line numbers. Developers can see the exact problem line of code, and as with Page view, enabled highlighting of failing code segments.

You can access the two Snapshot views right now via the "Page diagnostics" page, reached via any diagnostic.

April 2010: We have recently made some improvements to the Sitemorse engine to handle XHTML+RDFa. These changes are now live and will be included in any audits run for you (including immediate tests and Snapshot).

Further reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/

Please note that according to the above specification the 'lang' attribute has been removed. We have reflected this in our tested of pages declared as XHTML+RDFa. The attribute 'xml:lang' should be used instead to state the language code. The Sitemorse Spelling module treats the 'lang' and 'xml:lang' attributes as equal, although should the values differ 'xml:lang' will be used for the language of the tag and child elements.

April 2010: We've been making some improvements to the way Sitemorse handles the differences between HTML and XHTML.

New diagnostic messages:

'/' in middle of attribute list

For example, <foo a=1 / b=2>

Close-tag X has extra '/'

For example, </div />

Missing </X>

We no longer allow implicit closes in XHTML i.e. <link ...> instead of <link ... /> or <p> with no </p>

Tag X should be closed using the minimized form

We are more specific about Appendix C violations. e.g. <hr></hr> doesn't say "Tag X does not need a close-tag", instead in XHTML mode it displays this new message instead:

Tag X should not be closed using the minimized form

For example, <p /> - another Appendix C violation

Minimized self-closing tags (e.g. <tag/>) are not allowed in HTML

For example, if you try to use <link ... /> in HTML mode

Attribute Y to tag X must take a value of Z

In XHTML mode we are more specific about boolean attributes, e.g. <input checked /> or <input checked="yes" /> or indeed anything except <input checked="checked" /> will give this message. In HTML it still says "Attribute Y to tag X does not take a value"

Monday 19th April 2010: Sitemorse now checks ID attributes for duplicates and checks to see if any fragment identifier included in a link actually exists.

Duplicate fragments, for example declaring two or more tags with the attribute 'ID="dupid1"', are reported under Code quality page 1:

file/html/badvalue Fragment identifier 'dupid1' used more than once

Links containing a fragment identifier which doesn't exist on the target page are flagged under Code quality page 2.

For example, if a page includes the link '<a href="#unknownid1-1">unknown local id 1</a>' but the corresponding ID 'unknownid1-1' does not exist, we raise the following failure:

file/html/unknownid '#unknownid1-1' not found

Monday 8th March 2010: If you have a Twitter account and want to let your followers know about your latest score we've added a link to help you out.

On the report summary page click the link "Tweet about this report". You'll be taken to twitter.com, if you're not logged in their system will prompt you to do so. Next you'll see a basic tweet from us ready to go. Make any changes and you're done.

Tweeting Sitemorse scores can be a great way of letting colleagues and customers know of your hard work.

Thursday 19th November 2009: We have added the capability for account holders to "opt-in" to receive an email when audits complete and for the "master" user to add email recipients on their behalf.

As part of this change we have also given control to the "master user" to grant access to any web address to any Sitemorse account holder in their organisation.

To grant access to audits to a new user, first click on the URL of the site on the Web addresses page to get to the "View audits for a Web address" page.

In the left hand column of this new page are lists of those people that have access to the audits and those people that receive emails about completed audits for this Web address.

Tuesday October 6th 2009: We are now identifying and validating links inside Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files and analysing more PDF files than before.

Identifying these genuine errors for you as part of the enhancements being introduced results in a more in-depth analysis being performed as we spider through the site.

Although this may, in the short term, have a detrimental effect on your scores it is nevertheless a positive move forward in that we will be ensuring that your users' experience on your website will be improved.

Friday 31st July 2009: Handling the different capitalisations of words by the Sitemorse Spelling service has been greatly enhanced.

Custom dictionaries now support a "match case" flag. When set, the Spelling Service only permits words which match the case precisely.

We've also overhauled the "rules" applied when analysing the content of your site, especially regarding capitalisation:

• Any dictionary word with unusual capitalisation (for instance: "friDAY"), or any word in your custom dictionary marked as "match case" must match exactly.
• Lower-case dictionary words may appear as title-case (with an initial capital letter) - for example as a word at the beginning of a sentence.
• Any lower-case or title-case dictionary word may appear in upper-case, for example as a title.
• Hyphenated words not exactly matching any dictionary words are broken apart into separate words and checked using the above rules.

More information is available in our blog article: "Adding words in SpellChecker just got a lot easier"

Wednesday 1st October 2008: Sitemorse has today relaunched the spell checker module to greatly increase the number of languages we evaluate.

This initial release includes support for:

• British English ("en-GB")
• American English ("en-US")
• International English ("en")
• Irish ("ga")
• Welsh (both "cy" and "cy-GB")
• French (both "fr" and "fr-FR")
• German (both "de" and "de-DE")
• Spanish (both "es" and "es-ES")
• Dutch ("nl")

To ensure content is evaluated under the correct language Sitemorse fully supports the "lang" attribute of any HTML tag. When the language codes above are encountered the appropriate dictionary is consulted.

Sitemorse fully supports ISO-5589-1 and the appropriate HTML entities for displaying words in the above languages.

Thursday 15th January 2009: It's been some considerable time since we last updated the way that scores are calculated. As this affects your ability to compare your site over time and how you stand in any of our surveys that your site might be part of, it is not something we would consider doing on a regular basis.

Reclassification of failures

These items have been changed to the severity of a "Functional" problem (i.e. the system has a low tolerance for these types of problem and they will affect your score)

• "Compromised" (red) email server problems
• Broken "mailto" links
• Pages with no title
• file/html/noframes
• url/fetch/badcookie***

*** url/fetch/badcookie now always counts as a Function problem, but it is not checked on external links, so the issues we encountered with Nedstats, Doubleclick, etc, should be removed

These items have been changed to a lower severity, similar to a "Code Quality" problem (i.e. the system has a higher tolerance for these types of problem and they will have a limited affect on your score)

• "Impaired" (amber) email server problems***
• Pages with no meta "description"
• Other meta-data problems (e.g. longtitle, badmeta, etc)
• "bad character in URL" type problems (e.g. file/url/badpath)

*** the issues we encountered with some email security services such as MessageLabs previously caused scores to be impacted negatively due to the email server configuration on their backup servers being non-standard. The new email service assesses these types of problems as "impaired" rather than "compromised" so the impact on scores will now be negligible.

Performance

We have introduced a new calculation to better represent the actual download speed from a website. The new data shows higher download speeds for most sites.

To take account of this we have increased the speed thresholds in the benchmarks used to calculate the Performance score. Most sites will not see dramatic changes in their Performance scores but when looking at the detail there may be a significant increase in the download speed figure.

Email testing

The new features of the service look at the email server infrastructure behind your email addresses to make sure that they are configured correctly and that the servers will receive emails.

We have come across numerous email server infrastructures that have either been incorrectly defined to DNS or are mis-configured and wont actually receive emails. Email servers can have different roles, e.g. they may be primary servers, secondary servers, load balance servers or fail-over servers. Each would be defined and configured differently.

This adds another layer of sophistication to our audits and ensures that you are confident that your email infrastructure is defined correctly and configured correctly. We'll also report any availability issues or intermittent type problems if they occur during one of your audits.

Site enhancements

The Directory map feature of the Inventory section is now "clickable". By default it loads as a collapsed list of directories, each sub directory can be expanded to display its contents. By making this change we have resolved a problem where sites with a deep directory structure extended off the page.

Based on customer feedback, we have made the font colour on our web site darker, in order to improve readability through greater contrast.

We have for several years now produced free reports for people that registered on our site but have not subscribed to the Sitemorse Services.

As from the 1st August 2007 we stopped running the free Reports and deleted all the old unpurchased reports stored on our servers.

These reports, on a limited number of pages, gave people an overview of their sites but no access to the detail of any issues. This facility was intended to show people what the Sitemorse Service had to offer.

The number of "free" ran to several thousand reports every month for people that never intend to buy access to the detail.

We will shortly introduce a paid for service where people can pay for an assessment of a Website (covering a greater number of pages than the previous "free" summary). Having reviewed the summary, they can then chose whether to purchase access to the full report.

This is NOT a realistic alternative to a subscription for organisations committed and serious about their Web presence.

If you'd like to discuss our subscription options please feel free to contact us.

Tuesday 8th January 2008: We have recently added a new "Surveys" tab to the Sitemorse secure site. This is intended to provide quick and convenient access to the Sitemorse surveys that we produce on a regular basis.

The Surveys page displays the complete list of public survey categories that we produce (for example, "Central Government" or "FTSE 100"). By each category is shown the most recent survey report, and a list of any sites shown on your "Site List" page which are included in that survey category.

To view the summary report for a survey, click its entry under the "Latest report" column. Summary reports are always available; if you have a current testing contract relating to a site which is included in a survey category, then you will see the full survey detail instead.

Tuesday 1st May 2007: As part of a general review Sitemorse has increased the functionality of our popular Immediate Reports facility,

Users who regularly retest the same page during the course of their development may now simplify this by clicking the "retest" button. Running a fresh report on the same URL and number of pages.

Additionally users may run an immediate batch test - a regular Sitemorse report on the first page of up to ten different URLs. To begin click the "Request an immediate test on multiple URLs" link and enter the URLs in the box provided. The first line will be used to identify the report later, and should not be left blank.

Tuesday 27th February 2007: As a part of our ongoing technology replacement and upgrade plan Sitemorse completed its migration to our new servers over the previous weekend. This will restore and enhance the high level of performance our clients have come to expect.

Changes include processor upgrades for every machine, RAID 10 disks with significantly more space, real time disaster recovery, dual power supplies and additional remote monitoring. At the same time we have updated our software to the latest versions available. Sitemorse itself requires minor modifications in order to fully optimise against the latest software.

Therefore you may experience some system down time while we get everything back to how you expect it.

Friday 15th December 2006: Version 3.0 of the eGMS required that web pages specify one or more categories from the GCL using the 'eGMS.Subject.Category' metadata field. The more recent version 3.1 of the eGMS now requires one or more categories from IPSV instead, using the 'DC.Subject' field.

So, for example, where you might previously have used:

<meta name="eGMS.Subject.Category" scheme="GCL" content="Advertising">

you must now use:

<meta name="DC.Subject" scheme="eGMS.IPSV" content="Advertising">

Note that the 'scheme' attribute is now mandatory.

For an interim period, Sitemorse will be checking for both 'eGMS.Subject.Category' and 'DC.Subject', and both GCL and IPSV - sites using either eGMS 3.0 or eGMS 3.1 will be able to achieve full marks on the eGMS Sitemorse Mark.

Please note however that at some future date (to be announced), we will discontinue support for eGMS 3.0 and sites not using 'DC.Subject' with IPSV will be marked down.

In general, converting from the previous standard to the new version should be reasonably straightforward - mostly a case of renaming the metadata field and 'scheme' attribute. There are two important caveats. Firstly, where you previously had more than one category in one meta tag, and some of them were non-GCL, e.g.:

<meta name="eGMS.Subject.Category" content="Advertising; OtherScheme">

these must now be added as two separate tags:

<meta name="DC.Subject" scheme="eGMS.IPSV" content="Advertising">

<meta name="DC.Subject" scheme="something-else" content="OtherScheme">

Secondly, although in theory the IPSV is a superset of the GCL and so in general the categories do not need amending, the following 56 terms appear in the GCL but not in the IPSV, and must be recategorised:

Adult education and skills

Agriculture, environment and natural resources

Alternative medicine

Arts, recreation and travel

Broadcasting

BSE, CJD and TSEs

Care for children

Care for the disabled

Care for the elderly

Carers and health professionals

Colleges and universities

Crime, law, justice and rights

Death and funerals

Devolution

Diseases

Drugs and alcohol

Education, careers and employment

Electoral system

Families and children

Fire service

Fish

Fisheries

Government spending

Health, nutrition and care

Heart disease and stroke

ICT in learning

Immigration and asylum

Inland waterways

Intelligence

International conflict

Land

Libraries and archives

Literature and writing

Living standards, incomes and wages

Marriage and divorce

Medical treatment

Monopolies and mergers

Nationalisation/privatisation

Occupational health and safety

Occupations and employees

Organic foods

People, communities and living

Personnel management

Pest and weed control

Plants and animals

Ports and maritime transport

Post Office

Public private partnership

Recreation facilities

Refugees

Roads and road transport

School types and choosing a school

Standards, weights and measures

Transport

War crime

Working hours, terms and conditions

Friday 1 September 2006: Since we changed the frequency of the rankings for local and central government, we have noticed a fall in the quality of the websites in this sector, on the whole UK Local Government fairs best, but the overall standard of the sites seems to be slipping.

Taking this on board and many client requests we have received, from September we will be returning to running of the surveys on a monthly basis – there will also be a new summary available providing details of the overall levels of function, compliance (HTML, Accessibility, eGMS) and performance, we intend to increase the distribution of the report, with printed copies being mailed out to all organisations.

Thursday 31 August 2006: Over the next 10 days, we are changing the format of the current free report. The new ‘free’ summary aims to provide a focused management overview of your website - checking far deeper than the current 10 pages, the review will now be of the top 125 page’s of the site – the free report will be no longer include benchmarking for the tested site(Sitemorse Marks), the findings reported will be;

• % pages that fail accessibility A & AA
• % pages that have failing website code
• % checks that had functional problems
• Site performance rankings, for the front page and the average for the site during the test
• Domain status
• Metadata % pages that fail

This new summary will also be available to all clients, as an addition to the current details provided.

Thursday 10 August 2006: We have extended and updated our metadata "scheme" checks. These relate to <meta> tags where the scheme of the metadata is explicitly identified using the "scheme" attribute - for example:

<meta name="eGMS.Subject.Category" scheme="GCL" content="Advertising">

If your site uses this type of meta tagging, and the scheme is one of the ones that Sitemorse knows about, then on the "Metadata" tab of your reports you will from now on see a new section, "Meta-data scheme checks". This section lists the number of pages using each scheme, and the number of problems found. You can see a detailed list of problems found, if any by clicking on the number.

The schemes currently supported include GCL, IPSV and W3CDTF, and we will be adding more in the future.

eGMS changes: eGMS.Subject.Category and IPSV

Although the eGMS currently requires a GCL category for the eGMS.Subject.Category metadata tag, the GCL itself is now well and truly deprecated. In addition, the release of the new version of the eGMS, which will require IPSV instead, is imminent. Therefore with immediate effect we have updated Sitemorse to allow IPSV categories, as well as GCL categories, in the 'eGMS.Subject.Category metadata'.

Wednesday 9 August 2006: There is a new feature on the "Inventory" tab of your reports. The new section is titled "Email and off-site links" and shows you how many email ("mailto") and off-site links (links to sites other than the one being tested) were found during the Sitemorse test.

Clicking on either the email or off-site links will produce a detailed list of all the links found. Next to each link is either a red or a green dot - green indicates that no problems were found with the link, and red indicates that one or more problems were found. Clicking on a red dot will show the exact problem(s) identified.

Tuesday 20 June 2006: In line with the ability to download a detailed report showing all problems found with the function or code quality checks, we have now added the ability to download the detail of all accessibility issues detected by Sitemorse.

The download is available from the accessibility tab of the Sitemorse report – the reports are broken down into individual downloads for A and AA, detailing the issues found when performing either the A or AA accessibility checks.

Monday 19 June 2006: Do you have a question about one of the Sitemorse tests, wonder what we check for when checking email systems, or would like to know more about the accessibility tests we carry out?

To help answer these and many more questions, we have now introduced a fully-searchable knowledge base. It contains details of the tests we carry out, many answers to questions about web standards, the feedback from our last couple of years' customer surveys (all anonymised!!) – hopefully providing the answers to many of the questions we are frequently asked together with specific details of what are tests are looking for.

We are looking to continually add to the content of the knowledge base, including linking out to many useful web resources on site build, good practice and standards - if there is anything you would like added, please email kbase@sitemorse.com.

Monday 15 May 2006: Sitemorse can now perform twenty eight (28) checks on Adobe PDF format documents to ensure users do not experience problems such as broken links, or failing email addresses – we are also the first to test whether or not PDFs are utilising the accessibility features provided by Adobe.

Sitemorse offers a number of tests while it ‘reads’ through the contents of PDF documents in order to discover embedded hyperlinks. Any links found are then followed and thoroughly examined in the standard manner for any other link found on a Sitemorse tested site. Sitemorse can detect many different kinds of problem, and additionally will contact mail servers to verify that addresses provided in ‘mailto:’ links are correct and functional.

Problems found in PDF documents, as well as appearing in the usual diagnostics list as appropriate for the particular error encountered, are also separately identified in the ‘Additional Findings’ section on the ‘Function’ tab of the Sitemorse report. Untagged PDF files are identified in the ‘Additional Findings’ section on the ‘Accessibility’ tab of the Sitemorse report.

Friday 5 May 2006: Sitemorse now checks that a site uses standard H1-H6 headings: "wcag10.useheadings: Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according to specification". By introducing heading sections within HTML users can navigate a page far easier.

Other markup may complement these elements to improve presentation (e.g., the HR element to create a horizontal dividing line), but visual presentation is not sufficient to identify document sections.

Since some users skim through a document by navigating its headings, it is important to use them appropriately to convey document structure. Users should order heading elements properly. For example, in HTML, H2 elements should follow H1 elements, H3 elements should follow H2 elements, etc. Content developers should not "skip" levels (e.g., H1 directly to H3).

Furthermore do not use headings to create font effects; use style sheets to change font styles.

Wednesday 12 April 2006: The "Website File Types" feature on the "Inventory" tab of your Sitemorse reports has been improved.

It now includes all occurrences of downloadable files (rather than just the first ten, as previously) and also provides information about file sizes, showing individual, maximum and average file sizes for each type. This allows you to keep track of what types of document your site users need to be able to read, along with how large the files are that they are being expected to download

Wednesday 15 March 2006: We have changed the look and feel of the report area of Sitemorse. The summary now focuses on specific key details and most of the report sections have been changed to provide a clearer structure for the detail they look to deliver. Along with the new layout, additional functionality is also being added.

The work is being carried out by the experts at Red Ant thanks for your sterling work, this is what they had to say;

"Many of Red Ant's customers use the Sitemorse product and the opportunity to bring together our own requirements as a website development firm and the needs of our customers to understand and interpret the report summary, allowed us to provide a unique "outsiders" perspective of what could be created."

"The new summary report is designed to make the results more digestible for non technical users, while still including the necessary detail to resolve any problems. We hope you are happy with the result of our customers and our input, we know we are."

Dan Mortimer - Managing Director www.redant.co.uk

Thursday 16 February 2006: Sitemorse now checks that a site does not simply use 'click here' when a more meaningful description could be used: "wcag10.linktarget: Clearly identify the target of each link".

Good link text should not be overly general; don't use "click here." Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing device) it says nothing about what is to be found if the link if followed. Instead of "click here", link text should indicate the nature of the link target, as in "more information about sea lions".

Tuesday 14 February 2006: Sitemorse now checks that a site does not use a client side redirect, when a hidden timer expires and suddenly the page being accessed jumps, without warning, away from the current page: "wcag10.norefresh: Do not create periodically auto-refreshing pages".

It is never correct to use a page that refreshes automatically on a timer.

Tuesday 8 November 2005: We have modified the overall ranking calculations to include both A and AA accessibility tests, we have also created a single performance mark.

The Download Speed and Response Time have been replaced by a single combined Performance Sitemorse Mark, which is comprised 50% from the download speed figures and 50% from the response time. The Performance Sitemorse Mark constitutes 26% of the Overall Sitemorse Mark.

We have also reviewed and changed the scoring for our download rankings.

Tuesday 16 August 2005: Sitemorse offers many tests to ensure that each page contains information in every required area, and where appropriate we also check that the data meets specific requirements,

For example the tests for the 'eGMS.Subject.Category' are as follows;

(a) is the correct scheme in use

(b) does the ‘content’ field contain information

(c) is the information in the ‘content’ field from the approved government category list

An example that would pass

<meta name="eGMS.subject.category" scheme="GCL" content="e-Government"

An example that would fail - Missing mandatory field

<meta name="eGMS.subject.category" scheme="GCL" content=""

An example that would fail - Bad data supplied

<meta name="eGMS.subject.category" scheme="GCL" content="incorrect chosen term here"

We are currently reviewing the tests and including checking for the IPSV classification, we will also implementing testing for the repeated use of the same ‘category’ content, although this doesn't fail against the published standards it is seen as poor practice.

July 2005: Since the introduction of Accessibility tests, we have received a number of questions about the testing methodology and the rational behind reporting a test as either 'check' or 'Fail'.

As with a number of guidelines for accessibility the WAI definition is rather ambiguous, it is for this reason AA tests to date have not formed part of the rankings calculations.

Until a more clearly defined requirement concerning use of pop-ups can be provided, Sitemorse will now advise of pop-up windows as a check.

The debate will continue on as to whether they should or should not be included and to what degree (warning the user, not filling the screen etc).

We respect to both sides of the argument (for and against pop-up windows) but as we are now going to include Accessibility AA testing as part of the only currently available website benchmarking it is vital that the tests we use to rank sites have no ambiguities.

Wednesday 13 July 2006: Instead of the 250-page summary report for all registered users, Sitemorse now offers ongoing tests of the top 10 pages with full access being provided to the report when it has completed.

There will be no restrictions or time limits for the reports. The full test results will be immediately available on completion of the test.

The full range of Sitemorse tests (some 200+) will be carried out providing the exact detail functional problems, performance issues, faulty email addresses, HTML or accessibility failures.

Friday 8 July 2005: Users with more than 5 sites under their Sitemorse login will notice their site list page has changed. You can now categorise main sites as "primary" and "secondary" - these sites will always be displayed. You can view your other sites by selecting "Show all sites".

Thursday 19 May 2005: Over the last 7 months we have been redesigning the user interface for Sitemorse and it has gone live today.

As Sitemorse's testing capability has grown significantly over the last 3 years, with more and more tests being added, the old style single report page was becoming a bit long-winded to use. With the addition of our adaptive availability monitoring service late last year and the need to add additional testing services we had to look at a completely new user interface. As you will now see we have changed the operation, navigation and the design making the reports simpler to understand and faster to access for key information points.

A number of new features have also been added:

• Priority Fix Report – looking at findings from the thorough Sitemorse tests and providing a guide to problems that should be addressed as a priority.
• Forward Report - you can provide access to your reports directly to any chosen third party, allowing quick and easy access for other team members or your service providers, without them needing to register on the system.
• Inventory Report – better classification of key information about your site, where things are, what files types are where, etc.
• Performance – improved performance reporting and graphical display of first page data.
• Function – direct access to the detailed breakdown of site problems.

To demonstrate our new interface, every one of our many thousands of registered users can have a free report. Simply login, and the report will be made available to you.

Nothing to email, no calls to make – we want everyone to benefit from the power and comprehensive testing capability of Sitemorse. The best way to experience what we do is see it.

Friday 26 November 2004: Internal document anchors are bookmarks within a page, which specify the exact positions within a page that can be linked to via URLs.

Sitemorse now creates a comprehensive database of these links while scanning a web site so that internal document references can be verified as correct.

Sitemorse reports will now include the following error; ID Missing – Error if a name is linked to but not defined

There will also be 2 new warnings;

Idconflict

If a tag such as <a name="..." id="..."> is specified inconsistently

Idduplicate

If a name is specified more than once within a page

Friday 12 November 2004: Sitemorse now checks that a site does not make use of outdated features: 'wcag10.nodeprecated: Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies'.

Use of old tags can lead to unexpected results, for example use of an applet rather than an object: <applet code="applet.tag.is.deprecated"></applet>

Thursday 12 August 2004: Our summary report now displays how many different keys were used by the site.

The access keys summary page shows the different keys used, how many different destination each key has, and the most common destination for that key.

The access key detail page breaks down information about one key only. For that key, the "top five" destinations (i.e. the destinations that are most commonly associated with that key) and the "bottom five" destinations (i.e. the destinations that are least commonly associated) are shown. For each destination, the first ten pages which defined that key to go to that destination are listed.

From this you are able to obtain the following information:

• a list of every access key used on your site
• for each key, how many different destinations it goes to (i.e. is it used consistently or not)
• if it isn't used consistently, you can use the detail page to identify what section(s) of the site use the key in what ways, and if there are any lone pages or small sections using the key in a way inconsistent with the rest of your site you can identify those sections easily.

We will also be adding further errors and warnings. For example, defining the same key twice on one page, defining keys that simply don't exist (such as accesskey="hello"), and defining keys that most browsers won't let you use.

Monday 26 July 2004: With the continued awareness of the need to meet the requirements of website accessibility (WAI) we believe Sitemorse now leads the world on providing automated testing.

labelforms

12.4 - Associate labels explicitly with their controls

logicalevents

9.3 - For scripts, specify logical event handlers rather than device-dependent event handlers

noblinking

7.2 - Avoid causing content to blink

nodeprecated

11.2 - Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies

nopopups

10.1 - Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear

norefresh

7.4 - Do not create periodically auto-refreshing pages

useheadings

3.5 - Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according to specification

usestyle

3.3 - Use style sheets to control layout and presentation

validate

3.2 - Create documents that validate to published formal grammars

Sunday 16 May 2004: Losing a domain can have a serious consequence for a website manager, but they can be very easily overlooked – Sitemorse will help to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. We have recently added a new service for all Sitemorse registrants (customers and users of the FREE summary), offering automated monitoring of domain names and their expiry.

Sitemorse will now check every domain of every site on the system, and email the registered user both 1 month and 2 weeks prior to the expiry of the domain, allowing sufficient time for you to renew the domain. We do not offer domain renewal or related services, only advice of expiry.

Thursday 4 Mar 2004: To meet increasing demand, we will be upgrading our system over the next two weeks - doubling our server capacity, and implementing compression software and query caching to enhance speed.

Users should notice considerable improvements in speed and we will be able to test over 3,000 sites per week.

Wednesday 6 Aug 2003: Sitemorse automatically tests your site either every week or every month.

There are 2 types of testing, regular and full – both providing an unmatched level of website function and performance review and reporting.

Reporting now prioritises corrective action, focusing on the problems that are likely to have the greatest effect on the site and ones that are most likely to be seen by visitors.

Regular

This will test the most commonly-visited areas of the site. The tests will be of the top levels of the site which the majority of visitors will see (around the first 250 pages - equivalent to approximately four hours' browsing) and where the majority of technical/build problems will be uncovered. Concentrating on the front-end of the site also helps you to prioritize corrective efforts efficiently. This level of testing will also usually uncover any problems in page templates, allowing corrective action to take place that benefits the whole site.

Full

Based on the choice of annual service contract, we also include a number of full tests for your site. These are run when you want them to be, perhaps after a updated site is implemented or following significant change in the site content, e.g. for retail e-commence sites after the uploading of the new season's collections.

Following the completion of 4 tests, Sitemorse will also provide a range of graphing tools to enable user to review website progress and performance more effectively. These can also be used together with access statistics to provide very powerful site assessment.

Tuesday 10 June 2003:

Performance

We have improved the performance testing from Sitemorse so that it now reports the front page download speeds of your website against standards for home / modem user, Broadband User and corporate user. Individually reporting either a pass or fail for each category.

Server Operating System Report

Sitemorse now reports the web server operating system delivering your website. Information could be used, for instance, to ensure appropriate upgrades are carried out or ensure compatibility with future developments.

Wednesday 4 Dec 2002: Sitemorse has been busy developing in the last few weeks, recent additions include:

• Macromedia Flash files are now opened and examined
• New Free overview
• We now offer online demo
• Improved site benchmarking (MorseMarks) - at no charge
• Listing of the reported errors - separating internal/external problems

Friday 6 Sep 2002: Sitemorse now provides users with details of the slowest 10 site pages on the website, identified by both server response time and actual download speed. Thus allowing site managers to review and better manage site performance by remedying the worst problems first.