As we keep on saying, small companies can teach their big brothers a thing or two about running efficient websites. And that holds true particularly with the company we reckon has the best website in the Global Life Science sector.

Leading our benchmark this time is Swiss-based Cilag AG, which happens to be part of Johnson& Johnson. With a score of 8.6 out of a possible ten marks, it’s a staggering 210 places above the website of its parent company on our table.

Our Q2 2012 benchmark of more than 200 global-scale life science company websites maintains a trend we pointed out last year, with smaller, more focused players scoring much more highly on quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation (SEO) capability than the larger best-known multinationals.

Sitemorse surveys the websites of businesses and organisations in a number of sectors, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website. Testing is undertaken using automated software that reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table.

Formed in 1936 by the Swiss chemist Bernhard Joos, Cilag AG – motto “Small company environment – big company impact” has been part of its better-known parent since 1959 and specialises in diseases of the central nervous system and women’s health. Parent Johnson and Johnson appears in the table at 211, and with a score of just 2.3 out of ten has dropped 16 places in our benchmark since we last surveyed this sector three months ago.

The top three contenders in the sector haven’t changed from the Q1 rankings. In second place in the Q2 benchmark is allergy specialist Anergis, a Lausanne-based company whose mission is to find long-term cures for allergy sufferers. Their small but perfectly-formed website scores very highly on function and accessibility in our testing and was at the top of our last life sciences benchmark in Q3 2011.

Third is Siegfried AG, another Swiss-based company offering custom development services, drug substance & drug product manufacturing capabilities to the pharma majors. With an overall score of 8.2, just slightly down on their Q1 performance, we rated them very highly on function, code quality and server performance.

Other life science company websites we rated among the best include those of Lumavita AG, Piramal Healthcare, Eisai, 4-antibody AG, Kuros Biosurgery, Redbiotec and Newron Suisse SA.

A new website from Salmon Pharma, a mid-sized pharma company based in Basel, Switzerland specializing in renal care and pediatrics moves into fifth position with a score of eight out of ten.

Top climbers include LEO Pharmaceutical Products Sarath Ltd, up 122 places, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, up 109 and Ego Pharmaceuticals, up 97. Major fallers in this survey include Sanofi-Aventis, down 116, AmVac AG, down 106, and Alkermes, down 96.

At the very bottom of the list, with a score of 0.75 out of ten, is Beijing’s Sinopharm Group, though the main websites of Merck and Pfizer are in the bottom five with dire scores of 1.6 and 1.0 respectively.

It’s worth looking at how the internationally-known pharma names fare in this table; highest is the new Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG website which takes 27th position with a score of 6.51. New Sanofi-Aventis websites in the UK and Switzerland take 42nd and 45th place, although their main site is now down to 157th in the ranking, with 3.5 out of ten.

Eli Lilley Schweiz takes 60th place on 5.6 but the other big players languish in the doldrums; AstraZeneca has dropped to 101st position, GlaxoSmithkline is down 37 places to 110th position (their main website is placed 196th), Novartis is up 26 to 110, and Bristol- Myers Squibb is at 215th.

The fastest overall response time for a company homepage goes this time to Newron Suisse SA, but many of the big names feature in our list of ‘click and wait’ offenders. We think a response time above 0.75 seconds can have a negative effect on user experience, but our tests showed the Merck Serono International AG site to take on average 20 seconds to load the page.

Sitemorse concluded: Congratulations to the companies listed in the survey who take the time and trouble to ensure their sites are error-free. We are still seeing better performances from the small players than the large, but one day soon the big life science corporations will realise that good web governance is not expensive and that concentrating on improving their websites can have an effect down to the bottom line of financial performance, as well as providing an easier life for website users.

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 May 11th, 2012 and involved benchmarking more than 179,000 URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Chugai Pharmaceutical site which had more than 116,000 failures. Just 15 sites out of 238 tested were officially “error-free” according to the Sitemorse methodology.

More information

• More information about our surveys and what they test can be found on our website www.sitemorse.com
• For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com

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