I made the mistake of reading some of the items that come up if you Google Sitemorse.  I was a bit shocked at first by the venomous nature of the articles.  I then noticed they were all from 2005.  Someone must have kicked off a "let's knock Sitemorse" spree.  lots of invective about Automated tools in general, all comments only related to Accessibility.

There were several comments about how the Sitemorse product was closed source so it wasn't possible to check the code for it's methods and accuracy.  Well that's an undeniable truth but it also applies to the vast majority of commercial products so I'm not sure that's a big negative.  Mention is made of there being no sign of any peer review having taken place.  That's true in a way.  But then we have a strong user base that regularly give us satisfaction ratings of over 80% in our regular client surveys.  Oh and as Sitemorse is a subscription based service I think the 88% renewal rate is a significant indicator of what the people that actually use the tool think about it.

They labour the point that automated testing for accessibility is only a partial solution but only grudgingly accept that we make this point ourselves.

As I said the comments all relate to the Accessibility checks we do.  In fact reading the articles you'd think that the only thing Sitemorse does is to check accessibility.  Actually we added the accessibility checks to the product after it had been in existence for some time.  The product checks a whole range of things from function (missing items, broken links), code compliance (checking HTML against W3C standards), metadata, performance, email (checks email addresses are valid and email servers are configured correctly), spell checking, PDFs.

And, of course, they moan about the surveys (I covered this in yesterday's entry)blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/who-are-these-people-that-hate.html.  But both function and performance have a higher weighting than accessibility when we come to score sites as they affect everybody using the site.  See here for how we calculate the scores secure.sitemorse.com/benchmark.html

We made many approaches to them to engage in an open discussion with them.  We offered to fly Dan Champion down from Scotland to meet with us.  Likewise we offered several dates for the man at the watchmakerproject.com to meet and discuss his points with us, to no avail.

Not sure if they have moved on to other less durable targets for their invective or they're too busy with their day job.  Just a shame that they're on the first page of a Google search as people often don't check how old the entries are.  Google need to invent some graphical way of indicating the age of items.  Perhaps they could turn them shades of green with the odd fly hovering over.