There's always lots of bad press about pretty much anything we do as a nation compared to everybody else. So despite having had a far better economic record than the rest of Europe for over a decade we're suddenly being portrayed as the "sick man of Europe" again. We're hopeless at sport even though our guy got knocked out by the eventual winner at Wimbledon (OK so he didn't play well but Nadal has been awesome). Our industries are less efficient than other countries but we've got higher employment levels even without trade barriers that others use. So where's this leading ?
Sitemorse run surveys against various industry sectors. We run one of our reports against each site in the survey table, score each site and then rank them. We run these surveys against a few sectors in the USA so I thought it would be interesting to see how the UK sites stacked up against their US counterparts.
FTSE 100 Vs. Fortune 100
Website Survey June 2008 - FTSE 100
94.0% pages passed functional tests
28.9% pages passed code standards
77.9% pages passed accessibility (level A)
8.09% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
Website Survey June 2008 - Fortune 100
96.1% pages passed functional tests
11.0% pages passed code standards
45.6% pages passed accessibility (level A)
0.92% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
So, ever-so slightly better on the Function tests, substantially better at writing standards compliant code and streets ahead in terms of Accessibility.
UK Central Gov. Vs. US Federal Gov.
Website Survey June 2008 - UK Central Government
94.3% pages passed functional tests
41.0% pages passed code standards
87.5% pages passed accessibility (level A)
11.3% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
Website Survey June 2008 - US Gov Federal Agencies
93.2% pages passed functional tests
16.3% pages passed code standards
64.5% pages passed accessibility (level A)
0.62% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
And lo and behold we have a very similar situation, with the same strengths and weaknesses appearing.
UK Local Gov. Vs. US State Gov.
Website Survey June 2008 - UK Local Government
94.7% pages passed functional tests
47.8% pages passed code standards
95.2% pages passed accessibility (level A)
26.3% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
Website Survey June 2008 - US Gov State and Territorial Government Websites
94.8% pages passed functional tests
15.9% pages passed code standards
77.8% pages passed accessibility (level A)
0.31% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
Coding standards are clearly not a top priority for any of the US sectors. This may come home to bite them in the pants with new versions of browsers, especially IE 8. (see my blog posting on this http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/firefox-3-hits-8-million-downl.html) And, even though we have slightly different Accessibility standards and legislation the US results are disappointing.
So this is an island of good news in a sea of doom and gloom from the mainstream press. I bet this doesn't hit the headlines of either the Red Tops or the Broadsheets. If I want to get some press coverage for the Sitemorse Surveys I need to find some bad figures. Perhaps the UK retail sector might get some coverage
Website Survey July 2008 - Retail
93.4% pages passed functional tests
10.5% pages passed code standards
54.1% pages passed accessibility (level A)
0.73% pages passed accessibility (level AA)
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