Over the years we have expanded the range of tests Sitemorse offers, highlighted important news and ranked top websites according to their Sitemorse result.
| Website benchmark - Arresting website performance once again for Cleveland Police - 23 Jan 2012 | |
 | Well done Cleveland Police, whose website again is the top police force site in the ... |
 | Well done Cleveland Police, whose website again is the top police force site in the UK, according to new research from Sitemorse. The Cleveland force – motto “Putting People First” has the top scoring site for the sixth survey in succession in January’s Q1 2012 Police Forces web benchmark. The Cleveland force, which polices the industrial districts of Hartlepool, Redcar and Middlesbrough, is very web-focused and its website has a very strong mix of advice and information, news and appeals for help from the public, supported by a strong social media presence using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Although Sitemorse has marked it down slightly since the last survey against a variety of criteria including compliance, quality and accessibility, with 8.6 marks out of a possible ten it still comfortably leads the field of nearly 60 police authority websites we tested. Also scoring very highly in the survey were the Norfolk and Suffolk forces, both with an identical score of 85.4. Although Norfolk was in our previous top three, Suffolk has come 22 places up the table to scoop second position. Three Scottish forces, Dumfries and Galloway, Tayside and Strathclyde are in the top ten of websites surveyed, as are the Leicestershire, Cheshire and Northamptonshire forces. North Wales police is once again fifth in the survey, keeping the same result as last time. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. Full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website. We said when our last police websites survey was published that “ …the nation's biggest and best-known forces once again serving time at the bottom of the table.” This is still very much the case with our Q1 2012 survey, with West Midlands, Hampshire and West Yorkshire rated lowest in the survey, which covered the websites of 59 police forces around the UK . Merseyside’s force website has risen five places since last time but can still only manage a score of 3.8 out of 10. London’s Met has also risen eight places but only scores 5.1. We have noted improvements in the sites of the Suffolk, Kent, Essex and Wiltshire Constabulary, though, all of which rose between 16 and 22 places in the survey.
About our surveys For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control. We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites. Technical Data This survey took place on 4th January 2012 and involved benchmarking almost 100,000 URLs. Fastest overall response time from any site was, not what you might expect :-) was from the British Transport Police. More information |
| Website benchmark - Uni’s make a comeback in our second higher education benchmark - 19 Jan 2012 | |
| | The websites of several UK Universities have been marked highly in new benchmark research from ... |
| | The websites of several UK Universities have been marked highly in new benchmark research from Sitemorse (Q1, 2012 Website benchmark) after the previous survey of Q4 2011 was dominated by FE colleges. London’s LCA Business School, Walsall College, Warrington Collegiate, and South Cheshire College again top the sector survey, but this time there are high marks for Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, Birmingham University and Norwich University College of the Arts (NUCA), named in The Guardian's University Guide 2012 as the top specialist arts institution in England. Sitemorse conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. This is only the second time we have audited higher education websites against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from this, the first education survey this year, and other recent surveys can be seen on our website. Well-respected business, accountancy and management college the London-based LCA Business School tops the benchmark, scoring 9.2 out of ten possible marks in a website survey covering nearly 300 education establishments across the UK. Walsall, Warrington and South Cheshire Colleges maintain their top-of-chart positions but whereas last year there were no universities in our ‘top ten’, this time Heriot Watt, described as Scotland’s most international University scored 7.1, rising ten places in our survey, and NUCA , with history tracing back to 1845 but a University College only since 2008, scored 7.2 . Websites change all the time, for better or worse, so there is always volatility in the survey results from our software-tested benchmarks. This time there were improvements noted in the College of Law and Hull College sites (both up 175 places from the last survey), the University of Birmingham, up 139 places and South Devon College, up 132 places. Falling back from last time are Worcester College of Technology, down 213 places, Southport and Exeter Colleges, and the University of Reading, which have all dropped around 150 places in our table. The dubious distinction of having the least-efficient websites goes to Norwich City College of Further and Higher Education, also rated the slowest website based on load times on this survey. Sitemorse concluded: This is only the second time we have benchmarked higher education websites, and we were pleased to see a slightly better performance from universities this time. Apart from those previously mentioned, there were better scores for Robert Gordon University, the University of Cumbria, Lincoln, Hull and Northampton universities as well as Manchester Metropolitan. There is still plenty of room for improvement, given how important these websites are for attracting the best and brightest new talent, but it’s encouraging to see a slight upward trend. About our surveys, and how they work For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control. We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites. Technical Data This survey took place on January 4, 2012 and involved benchmarking more than half a million separate URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the New College, Stamford site, with more than 111,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site tested was the University of West London website. Just six sites were officially “error-free” according to the Sitemorse methodology. More information • Information about our surveys and what they test. |
| Web Manager’s Toolkit - Performance - 10 Jan 2012 | |
| | Performance is a crucial issue for anyone who runs a company website – the rewards ... |
| | Performance is a crucial issue for anyone who runs a company website – the rewards can be great and the consequences of failure can even impact the organisation’s ‘bottom line’ financial performance. Page checking for free https://snapshot.sitemorse.com/ssc.html But a website’s performance does not just depend on the power of the web server involved. There are a number of elements that will affect the performance of any site, starting from the very first decisions made. Managers with responsibility for operating a website should also beware of internal testing that can often mask performance issues - tools that are part of the content management system or run by the company’s IT department often can see the website from the inside, rather than from the point of view of the end user. At Sitemorse, we often liken the performance issue to a car . There is no point in comprehensively testing the performance of a car if it’s running, for example, on the wrong type of fuel. Or if the wrong tyres are fitted. A flat tyre will hamper performance even more! A website is only usually as good as its weakest link, so a badly-planned site, like a badly-designed car, is going to be left behind by its competitors before the end of the race. Problems often come down to the same old things – bad links, images larger than necessary, poor code that makes the site work harder than it needs to. Talking to potential clients, we are often surprised to hear they are not finding problems with their websites. Frankly, this issue is quite well-known, and we are not the only ones testing, and finding the same problems. One manager we spoke to recently said we must run our tests on their ‘bad days’ , but it does seem unlikely that major companies would allow the same level of carelessness in other important areas of communication, such as annual reports. The real problem here is the nature of the web, a much more complicated operation than printing and distributing documents and literature, for example, where standards have been gradually built up over a long period. Defining a precise colour for a brochure, for example by giving a pantone reference , is not feasible for the web, because the huge variety of monitor set ups, lighting etc mean that colours are experienced differently by different users. The example holds for almost everything about a website – there are probably more contributors to a website than to any brochure, perhaps scattered internationally or across a wide area, using different set-ups, equipment, browsers, just to quote a few examples. A good web manager knows a little about lots of things, and needs to develop his or her own way of developing checks on everything they are told from design and technical agencies, fellow employees, members of the IT and other specialist departments and even company management. Few have the big picture when it comes to a website, and there can be a tendency to not see the wood from the trees, particularly when all the messages are good ones ( such as, “our new site is online and breaking all records”. The Sitemorse Web Managers Toolkit provides hard evidence of problems and can be a very useful check for web managers and editors wanting to see their site from the users point of view but who don’t want to spend their entire day clicking on links or running free tools over the site. Our free Snapshot tool will warn you about performance issues found on any tested webpage. The Performance icon gives information of the elements of the page being tested that can affect load, such as large images, for example. Clicking this icon will give a more detailed report so the web content editor can make the necessary changes quickly – and then re-test the page to ensure the changes have fixed the problem. The free service can be extended to check for IP/trademark infringement and alert you to brand issues or spelling problems. |
| Let the world know your website is working efficiently - 20 Dec 2011 | |
| | From early next year Sitemorse clients will be able to prove that their websites are ... |
| | From early next year Sitemorse clients will be able to prove that their websites are rated highly on important criteria such as functionality, accessibility and compliance. They will be able to display an exclusive interactive button on their homepages that will show when their website was last checked by Sitemorse. The buttons will prove that the website has been validated by Sitemorse.
Why use external validation for your organisation’s website? The largest companies operating across many countries have enormous territories of data, some current - some, unfortunately, out of date- and much of it run by subsidiaries and outside agencies. About us For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control. We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites. More information For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@sitemorse.com |
| Website benchmark - UK Gov Q4/11 "Safety, Health and Taxes come top online" - 20 Dec 2011 | |
| | Health and Safety officials, Northern Ireland government departments and the UK taxman run the most ... |
| | Health and Safety officials, Northern Ireland government departments and the UK taxman run the most efficient websites, according to new research from Sitemorse. The websites of the Health and Safety Executive, NI Direct and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) take the honours in our fourth-quarter government survey, covering nearly 350 central government departments. The Health and Safety Executive website has appeared in seven of our surveys in the last 18 months and has always been well above target against criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The HSE’s objective, simply put on their homepage is to prevent people being killed, injured or made ill by work, and the site equally is simple, logical, and navigable. Up two places from its previous ranking, the HSE scores a healthy 9.12 marks out of a possible ten in the Sitemorse benchmark. In second position is NI Direct, perhaps an unfamiliar website outside of Northern Ireland. NI Direct, the official government website for the people of Northern Ireland, has a huge remit and many audiences to cover on an enormous variety of topics. Sitemorse gave it 8.12 marks out of ten. HMRC’s site may not be one you’re familiar with – who says tax is never taxing – but it received 8.01 marks and rises three places in the Sitemorse table. The site carries an enormous amount of information for taxpayers and employers and there is a certain amount of online functionality for submitting text returns and other data. Why is all this important? Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The government websites were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website. More about what we do and how we do it can be seen below. Sharing honours at the top of the table are the websites of the Valuation Tribunal Service, UK Intellectual Property Office, the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, and the Northern Ireland Department of Justice. Most improved sites were those belonging to the Scottish National Party – up an amazing 326 places from the last survey – and the Tenant Survey Authority, which has risen nearly 200 places. Biggest faller this time was the government’s top secret listening outfit GCHQ, which drops 265 places and only manages a score of 3.05 out of ten. Trailing the table with scores of around 2 out of ten were the Civil Service website, the Museum of London , the Victoria and Albert Museum, Police Complaints Commission, and the Olympic Lottery Distributor. Sitemorse concluded: The government benchmark tends not to be as volatile as others such as the FTSE or retail , and there’s little doubt the websites at the top of our table do a difficult job consistently and well. We are still seeing far too many government sites breaking their own laws on accessibility and we’d hope for better scores from important public-facing functions like the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts. For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control. We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites. Technical Data This survey took place on December 2 2011 and involved benchmarking more than 600,000 URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Ordnance Survey site, with more than 46,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site was from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE). Only seven sites were officially “error-free” according to the Sitemorse methodology. More information • Our ranking methodology page / how we come to our conclusions |
| Now you can share your snaps with the world.... - 13 Dec 2011 | |
| | Sitemorse's free Snapshot tool, which allows you to check any web page for broken links, ... |
| | Sitemorse's free Snapshot tool, which allows you to check any web page for broken links, over-large files, missing images, unwanted cookies and a host of other potential problems, can now be easily shared with colleagues and friends. When you run Snapshot on any page you can click on the top left hand of the page to send your findings via email. The recipient can then click on the link to see your audit summary. This is a very simple way to share findings and potential errors or to bring items needing correction with colleagues. See it on the blog at http://blog.sitemorse.com/2011/12/now-you-can-share-your-snaps-w.html For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com About Sitemorse Sitemorse is the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. With nothing to set up or manage, Sitemorse's services are focused on optimising visitor experience, improving search rankings, protecting brand, IP and compliance. Covering performance, compliance (accessibility, brand, code, regulatory, SEO) and quality - from one to a million pages, monitoring from every second to every year, and everything in-between - Sitemorse delivers control and confidence for the Internet and Intranet sites of hundreds of clients. |
| Good standard of websites in local councils UK - 02 Dec 2011 | |
| | The UK’s best local government websites are in North Devon, South Wales and Leicestershire, according ... |
| | The UK’s best local government websites are in North Devon, South Wales and Leicestershire, according to new research from Sitemorse. More than 20 council websites scored highly in the Sitemorse UK Local Government Q4 2011 benchmark, each scoring more than seven out of ten marks in a website survey covering more than 400 of the UK’s local government organisations. Sharing the honours with a mark of 9.4 each are the North Devon Council and the Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, while just behind them at 9.0 is Leicester-based Blaby District Council. Also scoring very highly in the survey were the London Borough of Hillingdon, top of the Q3 survey and rated fourth this time, North Down Council, based in Northern Ireland, another previous winner, local councils in Fife and East Dumbartonshire – Fife having moved 300 places up our table since the last survey - Dorking-based Mole Valley District Council, Vale of Glamorgan, Gwynedd, Larne, Highland, Aberdeen, and southern-based Wycombe and Slough councils. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The council websites were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen at http://www.sitemorse.com/rt/805/a2a1c32d. Barnstaple-based North Devon Council has an area covering more than 400 miles of England’s finest countryside and coastline. Like all local council websites, its site has a huge variety of audiences. The council’s mission is to improve the quality of life for everyone in North Devon and the website is strong on accessibility, providing large print, Braille and audio facilities for disabled users. The Rhondda Cynon Taf website has an eye-catching display designed to inform a wide group of users and offers online registration for voting, the facility to pay council tax online and a postcode-based search facility so resisdents can find and contact their local councillor. The Rhondda site has moved up 34 places since the Q3 survey of local government sites. As in so many of our surveys, It was not all good news, of course, and around 30 sites scored less than three out of ten in the listing. Councils at the bottom of our table include East Staffordshire, Denbighshire, Teignbridge, Derry, Nottingham and Rushcliffe.
About our surveys For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is the product of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Technical Data This survey took place on November 20 2011 and involved benchmarking more than a million URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for Conwy Borough Council’s site, with more than 82,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site was South Norfolk Council. For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com
Sitemorse is the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. With nothing to set up or manage, Sitemorse's services are focused on optimising visitor experience, improving search rankings, protecting brand, IP and compliance. Covering performance, compliance (accessibility, brand, code, regulatory, SEO) and quality - from one to a million pages, monitoring from every second to every year, and everything in-between - Sitemorse delivers control and confidence for the Internet and Intranet sites of hundreds of clients. |
| Performance is not just for Formula One - 30 Nov 2011 | |
| | Performance is a crucial issue for anyone who runs a company website - the rewards ... |
| | Performance is a crucial issue for anyone who runs a company website - the rewards can be great and the consequences of failure can even impact the organisation's 'bottom line' financial performance. But a website's performance does not just depend on the power of the web server involved. There are a number of elements that will affect the performance of any site, starting from the very first decisions made. Managers with responsibility for operating a website should also beware of internal testing that can often mask performance issues - tools that are part of the content management system or run by the company's IT department often can see the website from the inside, rather than from the point of view of the end user. At Sitemorse, we often liken the performance issue to a car . There is no point in comprehensively testing the performance of a car if it's running, for example, on the wrong type of fuel. Or if the wrong tyres are fitted. A flat tyre will hamper performance even more! A website is only usually as good as its weakest link, so a badly-planned site, like a badly-designed car, is going to be left behind by its competitors before the end of the race. Problems often come down to the same old things - bad links, images larger than necessary, poor code that makes the site work harder than it needs to. Talking to potential clients, we are often surprised to hear they are not finding problems with their websites. Frankly, this issue is quite well-known, and we are not the only ones testing, and finding the same problems. One manager we spoke to recently said we must run our tests on their 'bad days' , but it does seem unlikely that major companies would allow the same level of carelessness in other important areas of communication, such as annual reports. The real problem here is the nature of the web, a much more complicated operation than printing and distributing documents and literature, for example, where standards have been gradually built up over a long period. Defining a precise colour for a brochure, for example by giving a pantone reference , is not feasible for the web, because the huge variety of monitor set ups, lighting etc mean that colours are experienced differently by different users. The example holds for almost everything about a website - there are probably more contributors to a website than to any brochure, perhaps scattered internationally or across a wide area, using different set-ups, equipment, browsers, just to quote a few examples. A good web manager knows a little about lots of things, and needs to develop his or her own way of developing checks on everything they are told from design and technical agencies, fellow employees, members of the IT and other specialist departments and even company management. Few have the big picture when it comes to a website, and there can be a tendency to not see the wood from the trees, particularly when all the messages are good ones ( such as, "our new site is online and breaking all records". The Sitemorse Web Managers Toolkit provides hard evidence of problems and can be a very useful check for web managers and editors wanting to see their site from the users point of view but who don't want to spend their entire day clicking on links or running free tools over the site. Our free Snapshot tool will warn you about performance issues found on any tested webpage. The Performance icon gives information of the elements of the page being tested that can affect load, such as large images, for example. Clicking this icon will give a more detailed report so the web content editor can make the necessary changes quickly - and then re-test the page to ensure the changes have fixed the problem. The free service can be extended to check for IP/trademark infringement and alert you to brand issues or spelling problems. Geoff Paddock is a web consultant who has managed corporate websites for ICI , Wolseley plc and a number of less well-known clients. |
| Great change among top performing UK retailers’ websites as many new merchants appear - 29 Nov 2011 | |
| | New names proliferate at the top of the table of the best performing UK retail ... |
| | New names proliferate at the top of the table of the best performing UK retail websites in Q4, with seven merchants rising up the rankings to take their place in the top 20, according to the latest results from the quarterly testing of the Retail 500 of top UK online stores. By Glynn Davis Testing for the final quarter of 2011 reveals seven retailers have improved their performance to earn a place among the elite operators in the top 20, compared with only four that managed this feat in Q3. The full results can be found at; http://www.sitemorse.com/survey/report.html?rt=802 The newcomers comprise: Jane Shilton, which moves up 128 places; Brighthouse that climbs 169 places; KD Beds up 32, Greenhalghs Craft Bakery up 172, Aldi Stores up 29, QD Stores up three; and the biggest climber in Q4 Chums moves up an incredible 387 places. The testing of the 500 sites is undertaken by Sitemorse using automated software that, page by page reads the first 125 pages of each retailer’s sites to generate a ranked table based on checks to Quality, User Experience, Accessibility, Performance and SEO capability of each of the websites. Lawrence Shaw, chief executive of Sitemorse, says: “It is refreshing to see such stiff competition among retailers for places at the top of the table. The variety of these new names is also interesting as it shows it is not just large names with non-transactional sites that reach these heights. In fact there are a high proportion of discount retailers now in the top echelon, which shows that high performance is not only the domain of large luxury goods retailers who can simply throw money at their sites.” Also performing well this quarter is DFS that retains its place at the top of the table with a score of 9.50 out of 10, which moves it up four places and pushes aside Anoushka London that briefly held the premier position. This is a return to form for the sofa retailer that has consistently been the best performing site over the three years that Sitemorse has been testing UK retail websites. Another positive note in Q4 is that almost 75% of the sites tested were found to have a page description, which is essential for sites to be picked up by search engines. Although this is arguably an impressive statistic it clearly highlights that an opportunity exists for the other 25% to easily improve their SEO capabilities by adding descriptions to each page. Improvements have also been made with titles, as just over 97% of sites tested in Q4 now have this essential ingredient for improving their SEO. What is noticeably absent from the top 50 sites in this quarter’s table are the major food retailers. Although Aldi Stores and Budgens are both present, with the latter in 25th spot with a creditable score of 6.74, there is no sign of the big guns Tesco, Morrison, Sainsbury’s and Asda. To their credit they are not among the weaker performers either where the scores for the bottom 50 sites range from 2.3 down to a disappointing 1.18 for Waterstone’s that props up the table this quarter. However, there remain many high profile retailers in this lower grouping including WH Smith, Halfords, Next, B&Q, Amazon and serious laggard Lastminute.com that falls 20 places to 466th spot with a score of only 1.36. The final ranked table includes only 470 retailers (a worsening on the 475 tested in Q3) because merchants were excluded from the testing if they used assistive technology such as JavaScript, which breaks the general “rules of accessibility” of internet sites, according to Sitemorse. About Sitemorse Sitemorse is the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. With nothing to set up or manage, Sitemorse's services are focused on optimising visitor experience, improving search rankings, protecting brand & IP and minimizing litigation exposure. Covering performance, compliance (accessibility, brand, code, regulatory, SEO) and quality - from one to a million pages, monitoring from every second to every year, and everything in-between - Sitemorse delivers control and confidence for the Internet and Intranet sites of hundreds of clients. |
| Swiss Banking Websites – Discreet, Efficient, like Clockwork - 24 Nov 2011 | |
| | Discreet, quiet and efficient – many Swiss banking groups apply the same methodology to their ... |
| | Discreet, quiet and efficient – many Swiss banking groups apply the same methodology to their websites as they do to their business, revealed in new research from Sitemorse. Our Sitemorse Q4 2011 survey of the websites of more than 200 Swiss Banks found a very high standard at the top of the survey, with 35 of those benchmarked classed as error-free. Around 50 per cent of the websites checked were in the acceptable to good range, a higher proportion than in other sectors recently surveyed by Sitemorse. Heading the ranking in this most discreet area – Swiss banks do not tend to be household names – is Geneva-based Banque Bauer (Suisse) SA. Banque Bauer - motto “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – was also at the top of the benchmark in the third quarter. The bank, formerly Banque Artesia was formed after a buyout by the Schuppli family in 2003 and is today the number one Geneva-based banking institution specializing in Family Office private banking services. In our survey, its website scored 8.89 out of a possible 10 marks. Second in the survey, having jumped 22 places up the table since the Q3 survey, is Lugarno-based Banca Del Sempione. The bank, which has a 50-year history, scored 8.84 out of 10. Third was the unlisted Zurich-based Centrum Bank (Switzerland) Ltd, a consistently high performer that has appeared in the last seven Sitemorse Swiss bank surveys. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The benchmark of the Swiss Banks involves using Sitemorse’s unique software ‘engine’ that, page by page reads the first 125 pages of each sites to generate a ranked table based on checks to Quality, User Experience, Accessibility, Performance and search engine optimisation (SEO) capability of each of the websites. Full details of the survey can be seen here (http://www.sitemorse.com/survey/report.html?rt=803) Other high-flying bank websites scoring more than eight out of ten in our benchmark included Nordkap Bank AG, Ersparniskasse Speicher, and Bank Cramer & Cie SA. It was not all good news of course, and a significant number of Swiss banks also had low scores. Just over 3.5 per cent of websites in the survey failed to even have page titles, an oversight which can indicate poor housekeeping and which can affect ranking in search engines. Sitemorse concluded: Discretion and a lack of fuss characterise the websites of the Swiss Banks and it does appear from this survey that a lot of quiet care and attention goes into the upkeep of them also. Having an efficient website is all about doing lots of small things well, and the Swiss banking sites compare favourably in the benchmark to most other sectors recently analysed by Sitemorse. About our surveys For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best. Sitemorse is the product of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Technical Data This survey took place on November 4 2011 and involved benchmarking millions of URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for Banca Zarattini & Co. Fastest overall response time from any site was HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA. More information • Click here to see our ranking methodology page – how we come to our conclusions
Sitemorse is the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. With nothing to set up or manage, Sitemorse's services are focused on optimising visitor experience, improving search rankings, protecting brand, IP and compliance. Covering performance, compliance (accessibility, brand, code, regulatory, SEO) and quality - from one to a million pages, monitoring from every second to every year, and everything in-between - Sitemorse delivers control and confidence for the Internet and Intranet sites of hundreds of clients. |
| Website Governance - Privacy Module - 22 Nov 2011 | |
| | Hidden factors on your website can affect customer experience and your own web compliance. |
| | Hidden factors on your website can affect customer experience and your own web compliance. Its not just about cookies.... next week we will talk about monitoring your site, alerting you to data leakage - either pre or post launch. Privacy is becoming an important issue both for web users and for website managers who have to deal with growing compliance issues internationally. This is a crucial area for Sitemorse and we have a multi-stage offering designed to assist several different levels of businesses involved in the issue. The European Union is concerned that ‘cookies’, little bits of data collected by a Web browser which inform advertisers about online users, could be a violation of privacy. European legislative changes that came into effect on 26 May 2011 will affect the serving and use of website cookies by online businesses. The new laws require businesses to ensure that users consent to receive cookies served through their website, having first provided them with clear disclosures about the purpose and use of those cookies. In the UK, regulatory guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office has made clear that, to prepare for these new requirements, businesses must identify what cookies they use, assess how intrusive they are, and then adopt appropriate strategies for user consent. There is unlikely to be any enforcement for the first year, but from May 2012 the legislation will be fully in force. Likely fines for non-compliance will range from £5,000 to £500,000. Privacy issues are not confined to cookies, although the EU legislation is the largest change that has been made to this area in some time. Online privacy encompasses topics like website privacy policies and practices, encryption, online anonymity, preventing inappropriate disclosures of personal information, and the online tracking of consumer behaviour. Examples of cookies include “session cookies” which will store your browsing information and will be active until you leave the site and close your browser and are then erased, and Persistent cookies, which help websites remember your information and settings for any future visits, resulting in faster and more convenient access since, for example, you don't have to login again. Besides authentication, other website features made possible by persistent cookies include: language and theme selection, menu preferences, internal site bookmarks or favourites, among many others. A persistent cookie enables a website to remember you on subsequent visits, speeding up or enhancing your experience of services or functions offered. How Sitemorse ensures your site’s privacy Sitemorse’s powerful engine can scan every line of code on your web page, a task that would be time-consuming and difficult for manual testers. We offer a range of corporate services, from an initial site index (inc. group / 'estate wide' domain discovery) through to automated delivery of individual reports for web managers – all with your own branding. As part of our corporate package we include a supported project plan to manage the domain discovery, auditing and site update process. We also have a 7 stage plan, which helps our clients focus time and resource around delivering compliance. Sitemorse runs on its own remotely-managed servers, meaning nothing to set up or install and can cover up to 10,000 sites. It's not really practical or reasonably possible to manually check a site for cookies - typically it can take say 4-6 minutes to check a page. Our solution offers a report in just a couple of hours, at a fraction of the cost of carrying out a manual review. Clients using Sitemorse for web governance and monitoring of their web presence will have privacy information presented as part of normal reporting. Snapshot Our free Snapshot tool will warn you about the cookies found on a webpage. It will also highlight accessibility problems, link issues, provide a SEO review and check the page speed. The free service can be extended to check for IP/trademark infringement and alert you to brand issues or spelling problems. Snapshot is available here and offers: •Live checking for any page Cookie Reports Cookie Audit and Advisory Service Sitemorse and law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse have joined forces to launch the Cookie Audit and Advisory Service. This partnership tackles the combined technical and legal challenges that businesses face in cataloguing existing cookie use and determining appropriate user transparency and consent strategies, and offers a three-stage review for businesses trying to identify and put in place comprehensive and transparent consent strategies. Initially, Sitemorse will use its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web content governance tools to undertake an extensive review of the website domain and identify the cookies and other tracking devices served through it. Field Fisher Waterhouse's privacy specialists will then review the potential intrusiveness of those cookies under European privacy law and guidance. Finally, Sitemorse and Field Fisher Waterhouse will recommend appropriate transparency and consent strategies, tailored to meet their clients' specific commercial and technical constraints. |
| Web Manager’s Toolkit - Quality - 17 Nov 2011 | |
| | Quality issues on your website are the most obvious ways your users can see there ... |
| | Quality issues on your website are the most obvious ways your users can see there are problems. The issue is as old as the internet – websites that don’t work as they should, or don’t work at all, and usually it’s all about quality, and ensuring your website code is fully functional. Sitemorse has been benchmarking the websites of organisations large and small for a decade, but we are still surprised how many ‘shoot themselves in the foot’ by incorporating elementary errors that users can see and which affect the whole user experience of using the site. More than fifteen years after the internet began to be a mass-market experience there are no longer any excuses for links that don’t work, or pages that do not have titles. Yet in a recent survey of the top 500 FTSE companies, we still found well over two per cent of web pages that did not have a title, and well over 3 per cent failing basic functional tests. Since a company’s website is the first port of call for virtually all users nowadays, missing images and poor links can give a poor initial impression. After all, if an organisation’s website is put together in a slapdash fashion, what does that say about the business itself? Google and other search engines may not properly catalogue or index a site that contains HTML errors, and that can mean less users finding what they are looking for – and in the case of e-commerce sites, perhaps a failure of sales and the consequential hit to the company’s bottom line. Around a quarter of users, according to recent research, will duck out of an online sale because of technical issues. A massive 82% of consumers said that if a business’ website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web - or even in- store. How Sitemorse improves your site’s Quality Sitemorse reports more than just that the link isn’t working. We tell you exactly why, give you the line in the code and the link text to look for. Sitemorse’s powerful engine can scan every line of code on your web page, a task that would be time-consuming and difficult for manual testers. We offer a range of corporate services, from an initial site index (inc. group / 'estate wide' domain discovery) through to automated delivery of individual reports for web managers – all with your own branding. As part of our corporate package we include a supported project plan to manage the domain discovery, auditing and site update process. We also have a 5 stage plan, which helps our clients focus time and resource around delivering compliance. Sitemorse runs on its own remotely-managed servers, meaning nothing to set up or install and can cover up to 100,000 sites. With normal websites today featuring hundreds or even thousands of pages, manual testing of pages is an expensive option in terms of man-hours, and you will need a large web team if you plan on doing it in-house. Typically it can take 4-6 minutes to check a single page. Our solution offers a report in just a couple of hours, at a fraction of the cost of carrying out a manual review. Clients using Sitemorse for web governance and monitoring of their web presence will have quality information presented as part of normal reporting. Snapshot Our free Snapshot tool will warn you about quality issues found on any tested webpage. The Quality icon can highlight shortcomings in the web page that can affect visitors to the site – for example, poor code which may mean links and contact details may not work. Clicking this icon will give a more detailed report so the web content editor can make the necessary changes quickly – and then re-test the page to ensure the changes have cured the problem. The free service can be extended to check for IP/trademark infringement and alert you to brand issues or spelling problems. Try snapshot for free at https://snapshot.sitemorse.com/ssc.html |
| Why do you need web estate governance? - 08 Nov 2011 | |
| | Can you imagine a major company that does not use the web to communicate with ... |
| | Can you imagine a major company that does not use the web to communicate with its investors, clients, suppliers and would-be employees? The largest companies operating across many countries have enormous territories of data, some current - some, unfortunately, out of date- and much of it run by subsidiaries and outside agencies. Web Estate Governance was a phrase that didn’t exist a few years ago, but as the importance of web communications has risen, more and more functions within organisations now have a vested interest in getting their messages across. And the politics don’t end inside the company, because more and more external regulation and outside standards are now in the mix. From EU rules on cookies to UK accessibility laws, the list of things a website needs to cover grows almost by the week. Having a proper methodology for managing the website is much more crucial now than ever before, and having the tools to support that is essential for any web manager who wants to manage his or her time properly. Sitemorse began as the tool of choice for those who wanted to ensure their site was free of broken links and code errors, but through various versions the software ‘engine’ has grown and developed alongside the web to become something that can be used much more holistically as part of the planning process of determining what the site should achieve, to building it while ensuring it covers all the necessary bases around internal ‘brand’ compliance, to meeting current standards around code quality and speed while also meeting third-party requirements, law and regulation. Sitemorse is used by many web managers in organisations large and small through the process of planning a site, getting it online and then ensuring it meets all its targets. Another great advantage of Sitemorse is that it works on external servers with nothing to download, so can be used alongside many different content management systems. Sitemorse looks at your site from the outside, rather than the inside, like your CMS, and can spot errors it fails to find. For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications, Sitemorse on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com |
| Website Benchmark - Colleges score over their posher fellows in the degree of website quality - 31 Oct 2011 | |
| | The UK’s colleges have taken the top-ten honours in the first-ever benchmark of higher education ... |
| | The UK’s colleges have taken the top-ten honours in the first-ever benchmark of higher education establishments from Sitemorse. Results are posted at http://www.sitemorse.com/survey/ Well-respected business, accountancy and management college the London-based LCA Business School and four Midlands and North of England colleges top the Sitemorse Universities benchmark, each scoring more than seven out of ten marks in a website survey covering nearly 300 education establishments across the UK. But there are no universities in our “top ten”. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations, and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. The education websites were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen here. Top marks to the LCA Business School, and also to Walsall College, Warrington Collegiate, and South Cheshire and Solihull Colleges, who were the top five in the survey. The first University in our table, Southampton-based Solent University, was 11th with a score of 6.8, closely followed by the Bishop Grossetest University College, Lincoln with 6.7. and the University Campus Suffolk (UCS) with 6.4. Other high-scoring colleges included Hopwood Hall College in Manchester, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Farnborough College of Technology, and the Mid-Cheshire and Newcastle Colleges. Most university websites score poorly on accessibility, meaning that disabled and partially disabled people with sight or hearing problems will have difficulty navigating them, despite the fact that it’s now as much part of UK law to have accessible websites as to provide disabled access to buildings. Sitemorse concluded: Our surveys do not test the beauty or aesthetics of websites but how well they work, and we were surprised to see a poor standard from many of the top centres of learning in the UK – especially given the way the top universities compete for students. Good websites involve getting little things right, such as making sure links work, that pages have titles and that users are considered at every stage. Perhaps some of the extra money students will have to pay in tuition fees will be spent to make university websites a better experience for users. About our surveys For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best – and worst. Sitemorse is the product of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.
This survey took place on October 5 2011 and involved benchmarking more than 550,000 URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for New College, Stamford. Fastest overall response time from any site was the University of West London. More information • Click here to see our ranking methodology page – how we come to our conclusions |
| Websites won’t be just tick - boxes thanks to new EU legislation - 14 Oct 2011 | |
| | A move to ban web users being tricked by ‘cost traps’ – meaning web traders ... |
| | A move to ban web users being tricked by ‘cost traps’ – meaning web traders have to disclose the total cost of a product or service - has been made into law by the EU. Announcing the legislation had been passed, the European Commission cited the example of buying airline tickets online, when customers may have needed to actively decline optional extras such as travel insurance. The new law means it will no longer be permitted to have them 'pre ticked' click boxes on websites - users will need to accept any extras or inclusions. The new legislation follows the recent changes to law on website ‘cookies’ requiring businesses to ensure users consent to receive cookies served through their website, having first provided them with clear disclosures about the purpose and use of those cookies. Sitemorse will deliver a solution to advise and alert its subscribers of any instances where tick boxes are offered 'pre-ticked' on their websites this month (Oct '11) - allowing key sectors like retail time to ensure their house is fully in order before the Christmas sales push. Lawrence Shaw, Sitemorse CEO commented: "Consumer protection is essential, and the EU is getting very focused on ensuring adequate safeguards are in place. “Along with the rules around the consideration and advice of what cookies you have in place, being continually aware of exactly what on your site reduces the risk of unnecessary compliance exposure along with maximising conversations whilst delivering the best possible online experience" he added. Website compliance is now a very fast-moving area, and website owners and managers often need help to keep up with changes. Sitemorse's agility and ability to continually to keep its website auditing engine abreast of the latest compliance and visitor needs offers its clients unrivalled 'web confidence" END Technical note: The new EU Consumer Rights Directive was formally adopted on 10 October 2011 by Member States in the EU's Council of Ministers. The new legislation will strengthen consumers' rights in all 27 EU countries, particularly when shopping online. After publication in the EU's Official Journal, governments will have two years to implement the rules at national level. The approval follows an overwhelming vote to back the rules by the European Parliament on 23 June 2011. The European Commission put forward the proposal in October 2008.
For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking and plays a unique role in helping organisations develop their web communications against those of their peers. Our clients operate in the public and private sector and include many local authorities in the UK, as well as small and large companies. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best – and worst. Sitemorse began by offering software that allowed users to be sure that their websites worked properly and did not have missing links. Our software has been very much developed in sophistication and the latest versions offer integration with the content management systems of our clients for pre-publication testing. Useful links; |
| Website Benchmark - “Cymru Am Byth” - Welsh websites among the very best in our Government table. - 12 Oct 2011 | |
| | Agencies based in Wales have three of the very best government websites, according to new ... |
| | Agencies based in Wales have three of the very best government websites, according to new research from Sitemorse. Green Wales, Plant for Wildlife and The Countryside Code, three websites run by the Countryside Council for Wales, are in the top five websites surveyed by Sitemorse in the UK Central Government Qtr 3 2011 Survey, each scoring more than eight out of a possible ten marks. Also in the top five are the websites of the Health and Safety Directorate and NI Direct. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations, and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. The websites of more than 350 government organisations were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen here. The Countryside Council for Wales has recently established three websites, and we were surprised to see them zoom to the top of the Sitemorse table immediately. Leading the table is Green Wales, second is Plant for Wildlife and in fourth place is The Countryside Code. The council’s own website, which has been around a little longer, comes 33rd in our latest table, no mean feat in itself, with a score of 6.1 out of 10. Three other sites scored more than eight – as well as the ones mentioned above, the HM Revenue and Customs website was also a top scorer. At the other end of the scale, several organisations scored less than two out of 10 for their websites. Only eleven sites overall were classed as “error-free” by Sitemorse and nineteen failed basic accessibility tests on every page, proving that while many organisations are trying harder to make sure their websites provide a good experience for users, many are still not doing so despite the fact that accessibility is now covered by UK law. Slow websites are a pain for all users – fastest in our survey this time was the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, obviously nuclear-powered. Joking apart, however, a page that takes more than 0.75 seconds to load can have a negative effect on user experience. Customers of the South West of England Regional Development Agency may have to wait around 48 seconds, according to our research, which of course means they will probably have long since given up by the time the page eventually appears. Among top climbers in this survey are the Insolvency Service, which at 28th position has jumped 310 places since the last survey earlier this year, and OFSTED at 17, which has climbed 234 places. In contrast, the British Forces Post Office (BFPO) is down 253 places. About our surveys For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking and plays a unique role in helping organisations develop their web communications against those of their peers. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. Our unique Index publications, which appear several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best – and worst. Further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications, Sitemorse on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com |
| Get your online shops in shape, it’s that time of year again! - 11 Oct 2011 | |
| | OK – with nearly three full months to Christmas, we must be mad talking about ... |
| | OK – with nearly three full months to Christmas, we must be mad talking about the C-word already, but if you’re a shopkeeper, the need for planning means that now is the time to be getting ready. That’s why you’ll find many high street retailers have sneakily started to display stuffed reindeer and turkey trimmings at the back of their stores, even as the last dregs of Indian Summer has had us all sweltering over the last couple of weeks. Online retailers had the best-ever Christmas last year, believe it or not, right in the middle of the worst recession of a generation, with more than 2.1 billion UK visits to retail websites, and 44% of Britain’s online adult population spending a total of £2.8bn in internet purchases. So, E-retailers, now’s the time to think about a pre-Christmas website health check from Sitemorse. A staggering 22 per cent of web users say they have not been able to complete purchases because of technical problems with websites, according to recent research, and that must mean an enormous amount of lost sales because of duff links, bad code and sites that are still, despite changes in the law, inaccessible to disabled users who make up a solid percentage of prospective online buyers. Our most recent retail survey in September covering the 250 top global companies found still only a handful have error-free sites and standards actually appeared to have dropped since the previous survey three months before. The start of the appearance of malware and phishing links in retail websites seem to indicate they are not being looked after properly by their owners – and that may mean the retailers involved will be paying via their cash registers for any neglect and consequential lost sales come Christmas Day. Sitemorse offers independent, authoritative and accountable software to ensure the quality, compliance, performance, availability and compatibility of your web estate. Delivered as a web service , it not require any client setup or management, so retailers can swiftly be assured that their sites are ready to handle the high pre-Christmas traffic of the next few months. You might be interested to read our recent retail surveys of the Global Top 250 and the UK retail top 500. And if you’re a retailer wondering how much time you have to start improving your web presence, you might like this blog from Simon Heyes at Internet Retailing |
| SPAR website is judged best in retail sector in Website Benchmark - 10 Oct 2011 | |
| | SPAR has the best performing website in the sector, according to a new website benchmark ... |
| | SPAR has the best performing website in the sector, according to a new website benchmark of 250 of the world’s top retail organisations. The research, from independent web testing and benchmarking consultancy Sitemorse, looked at quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation. SPAR came top of the rankings with a score of nearly 9 out of 10. Marketing manager for SPAR UK, Rebecca Whitmore, praised the site for its innovative features. “The website has an expansive recipe section for customers to upload and share recipes, while our Master of Wines provides advice online including food and wine matching and a wine style guide. The site also brings our long-term involvement with UK athletics to life in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. “The SPAR website is a vital communication tool for engaging with customers. We re-launched the site 18 months ago to provide customers with the service they want and we hoped this would improve customer loyalty. The website being recognised in the Sitemorse survey is excellent news.” SPAR has appeared in 15 retail surveys from Sitemorse over the last three years but this is the first time its website has come top of the rankings. The website is one of only nine classed as “error free” and scores highly on functionality and accessibility – with the homepage taking less than 0.75 of a second to load. The Sitemorse survey is published at the end of September, and SPAR is one of the few in retailing with a website score of more than eight, the acceptable level Sitemorse thinks all retailers should aim for. “Many other retailers can take a leaf out of SPAR’s book” said Sitemorse spokesman, Geoff Paddock. For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications, Sitemorse on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com |
| Website Benchmark - UK Police Websites - not an Arresting Prospect? - 07 Oct 2011 | |
| | UK Police Websites - not an Arresting Prospect? |
| | UK Police Websites - not an Arresting Prospect? Only four of more than 50 UK Police websites scored more than eight out of ten in an audit from Sitemorse, with the nation's biggest and best-known forces once again serving time at the bottom of the table in the Website Benchmark. Not for the first time, Cleveland Police, covering an area of 230 square miles and well over half a million people on the fringe of the North Yorkshire Moors, tops the Police Forces Survey Q4 2011 from Sitemorse with an outstanding score of 9.32 out of a possible ten marks. Other top force websites heading our survey included Norfolk, Cheshire, and Dumfries and Galloway. But the really big names – the West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, and Merseyside forces – are all in the bottom of the table, scoring less than four out of ten. Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations, and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. The websites of 58 police authorities in the UK were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen here. The Cleveland force – motto “Putting People First” policing the industrial districts of Hartlepool, Redcar and Middlesbrough, is very web-focused and there’s a strong emphasis on news on its website, which is linked to an active Facebook page. Cleveland is top of the Sitemorse survey for the fifth time in succession. Likewise, runner-up Norfolk Constabulary has a state of the art website and the web team obviously spends time making sure it’s error free – we found the following comment on the site: “We aim to keep our site free from errors and appreciate your help in bringing these mistakes to our attention.” Cheshire Police moved nine places up our table to score 8.48 with an arresting (pun intended) website that features a large graphic of male and female police officers reminiscent of TV’s The Bill. There’s a more rural feel to the Dumfries and Galloway force website, fourth in our survey. Covering some 2,649 square miles in the south-west of Scotland, the force is divided into two operational policing divisions serving 148,000 with the largest towns being Dumfries, Stranraer and Annan. Twice winners of our Police forces survey in 2010, Dumfries and Galloway scored highly this time on accessibility, function and performance. The fact that the smaller police forces seem by and large to have the best websites – North Wales, Lancashire, Leicestershire, and Strathclyde are also among the front-runners – where the larger forces with more resources lag behind, is not news to us. We have seen similar trends within other sectors, most recently global life sciences, where a group of small unknown pharma companies had better websites than internationally-known giant concerns. Sitemorse concluded: Operating an effective website is not just about throwing money at it – it’s often about taking care of small things, ensuring links work, that pages have titles and that users are considered at every stage. Organisations taking pride in their websites stand out from the rest. About our surveys Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility. Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best – and worst. Sitemorse is the product of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence. Technical Data More information |
| Website Benchmark - Best Council Websites succeed by Continuous Improvement and attention to detail - 03 Oct 2011 | |
| | London’s Hillingdon Borough has the best –working website, closely followed by North East Lincolnshire and ... |
| | London’s Hillingdon Borough has the best –working website, closely followed by North East Lincolnshire and High Wycombe, according to a new Website Benchmark from Sitemorse Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations, and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. The websites of more than 400 local government organisations were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen here. Hillingdon’s site is no stranger to the top of Sitemorse’s local government surveys, and has consistently performed above targets in more than 50 surveys over the last five years. Hillingdon’s first website went live on the web just fourteen years ago, and the current site is version nine of a continually-improving service to local residents. The site is run from a central database, optimised for mobile devices and web managers at the council have worked hard to improve the speed of delivery. Grimsby-based North East Lincolnshire Council’s site is also no stranger to continuous improvement. The current website has leapfrogged an amazing 270 places since our last local government survey earlier this year, making NE Lincs the biggest climber as well as second-best site. At the time of writing users of council services are being invited to contribute suggestions as to how the website can be developed. Midlothian, Belfast, Amber Valley and Bournemouth have all climbed more than 200 places since the last survey thanks to site improvements. The High Wycombe site has again performed highly in our audits since 2006, and offers a tailored menu of services to a multicultural audience with accessibility issues high on the website agenda. The news isn’t all great – although the above mentioned sites all scored more than nine out of ten in our survey. Only nine of the sites tested were regarded as “error free” by Sitemorse, and two websites, Denbighshire and East Staffordshire, scored less than two in our audit. As well as big climbers, we have had big ‘fallers’ in this survey, with Watford, Lewisham, Swindon down more than 200 places. North Somerset is the biggest faller, and has lost 321 places since the last survey. Websites for Derry and Selby failed basic accessibility tests on every page. One regular complaint from web users is slow-loading sites, and in this survey east Staffordshire has the dubious distinction of being ranked lowest in the survey and also slowest in our tests, with an average wait of 54 seconds to load the page. Fastest loading council site is currently Hampshire. |
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