I've just been reading some of the, predominately accessibility, forums that discuss Sitemorse.  I have to say that some of the rants do become tedious in the extreme no matter how many times the Moderator asks them to move the discussion on !

It seems that if there's any chance that the organisation publishing a survey has any chance of gaining any economic value from doing so they must be corrupt and anything and everything to do with the results of the survey should be ignored and publicly discredited.  Though many of these entries are several years old they still, annoyingly, appear on the early pages of a Google search for Sitemorse.

Move on a couple of years and the Client survey we ran in April this year tells a very different story.  The survey service gained a satisfaction rating of 4.05 out of 5 with 72% of people rating it Good or Excellent.

Comments like

"I like seeing an external assessment of our site"

"Useful comparison - allows us to review most relevant sites"

"great, competition drives everyone"

"very useful, local government managers like league tables"

So it's obviously not everyone's opinion that our surveys are of dubious value published by lying, money-grabbing charlatans.

In fact the point about competition is very pertinent.  We have several organisations sign-up to our service in order to improve there site in the surveys.  The nay-sayers would claim that it's frivolous nonsense to want to be ranked highly in our surveys.  However I'd strongly contend that if the motivation might be to get a better ranking BUT if the end result is a better quality, better performing more accessible website then the motivation is irrelevant - let's focus on the benefit.

So who are these people that complained ?  When we look at those people that do complain about the surveys they invariably work for organisations that are at or near the bottom of their sector's survey - no surprises there you might think.

What I find sad (in the new use of the word) is the vast amount of time they spend on the forums arguing about percentages and weightings etc. etc. or whether we should score people for accessibility because we can't check every test in the standard - when they could be making their websites better.  It's not that we don't listen to people's comments about how we might improve what we do (we've already made several changes as a result of the comments in this year's Client survey) it's just that there are a thousand different viewpoints on how we might score and weight things so we'd never make everyone happy.  For consistency's sake we'll keep things as they are for the moment.  Check out here how we calculate the scores secure.sitemorse.com/benchmark.html