As Sitemorse evolves and enhancements are made, we will at times introduce changes to the service that may affect your Sitemorse scores.

We have recently enhanced the service in a number of areas and several organisations are seeing their scores drop as a result - in particular, their Function score.

We are now identifying and validating more PDF files, where there may be broken links and failing email addresses and we are also performing checks on the CSS code within Webpages for broken links. If we find such failures they are reported and consequently the Function and/or eMail scores will drop for the site.

These are genuine errors that are being identified for you as part of the enhancements being introduced that result in more in-depth analysis being performed as we spider through the site.  Although this may, in the short term, have a detrimental effect on your scores it is nevertheless a positive move forward in that we will be ensuring that your users' experience on your website will be improved.

There are more changes planned (though no firm dates are available at this time) that will have an effect on your scores.  These include further enhancements to the CSS checking- syntax check of CSS code against the CSS Coding Standards  - and the addition of JavaScript syntax checking mentioned in the Newsletter that went out Monday 21st September 2009 - http://blog.sitemorse.com/2009/10/javascript-execution-sitemorse.html.

We appreciate that this may have an impact on your ranking in the surveys.  However, the better we are at identifying issues and helping you solve them, the higher the quality of your website - which will enhance the experience for your users.

If you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to contact me gevans@sitemorse.com