Sitemorse Blog

Website accessibility may finally be tested in the courts

2012-02-03T15:28:08Z

It looks as though the first high-profile test case for website accessibility may be heard in the courts, following allegations that blind charity Royal National Institution for the Blind is to sue the airline BMI on behalf of members who can't negotiate their website.

Legislation on making websites accessible was brought in in 2002, and although most - if not all - large organisations have made the right noises on their intentions in this area, Sitemorse continues to find many examples of non-accessible sites in its research.

No serious cases have come forward in the UK, but large companies have always worried that charities or pressure groups would eventually initiate action on behalf of the large numbers of disabled and partly-disabled people who use screen-readers and other software aids to view websites and who cannot find their way around websites not designed for those aids.

Sitemorse has little sympathy for large organisations who have the resources to improve their sites but who so far have failed to do so, and we regularly hear a litany of excuses - including one from a major retailer who complained we always check their site on the wrong day of the week.

The long arm of the law may finally be catching up with those who could make their sites accessible in hours or days but who never seem to get around to it.

Criminal waste of web opportunities

2012-01-26T08:50:30Z

At a time when the interactivity of websites allows police forces to engage with the public in more and more clever ways, we regret the fact that so few of them do it well.

Our latest benchmark into the websites of 59 UK police forces finds many of the biggest and best-known still failing to reach a mark of four out of ten for functionality, accessibility and a variety of other vital criteria.

Well done to Cleveland Police in the North-East of England - not perhaps the best known force in the land, but they have topped our website index now six times in succession.

The Cleveland force, which polices the industrial districts of Hartlepool, Redcar and Middlesbrough, is very web-focused and its website has a very strong mix of advice and information, news and appeals for help from the public, supported by a strong social media presence using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Also scoring very highly in the survey were the Norfolk and Suffolk forces, both with an identical score of 8.5 out of ten.

Three Scottish forces, Dumfries and Galloway, Tayside and Strathclyde are in the top ten of websites surveyed, as are the Leicestershire, Cheshire and Northamptonshire forces. North Wales police is once again fifth in the survey.West Midlands, Hampshire and West Yorkshire were rated lowest in the index, but the fastest-loading website was that of British Transport Police.

The full benchmark can be seen in the Surveys area of the Sitemorse website.

Dons and Dunces feature in the Sitemorse benchmark

2012-01-18T13:43:15Z

UK Universities performed better in our second -ever benchmark of higher education websites than they did first time around last year, when the top 20 places were all further education colleges.

Oxbridge still lags the field, but at least there are a number of Universities near the top of the table this time.

Our survey is not rocket science, merely a test of the college and Uni homepages against Sitemorse's criteria of code quality, compliance, and accessibility.

London's LCA Business School, Walsall College, Warrington Collegiate, and South Cheshire College again top the sector survey, but this time there are high marks for Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, Birmingham University and Norwich University College of the Arts (NUCA), named in The Guardian's University Guide 2012 as the top specialist arts institution in England.

This time there were improvements noted in the College of Law and Hull College sites (both up 175 places from the last survey), the University of Birmingham, up 139 places and South Devon College, up 132 places.

There were better scores for Robert Gordon University, the University of Cumbria, Lincoln, Hull and Northampton universities as well as Manchester Metropolitan. There is still plenty of room for improvement, given how important these websites are for attracting the best and brightest new talent, but it's encouraging to see a slight upward trend.

Full details can be seen in the surveys area of the Sitemorse website.

Grave new warning spotlights cookie use

2012-01-16T12:02:43Z

"One Foot in the Grave" actor Richard Wilson will be spotlighting the use of cookies this week in a controversial Channel Four documentary that says routine tracking of web users made him feel 'spied on'.

He told the Daily Mail website: "Perhaps the most shocking discovery I made on the TV programme was that machines don't just make life more difficult, many are also tracking what we do.

"Like millions of others, I spend more and more time online. I love my Mac and laptop as much as the next person. During the making of the programme, the producers asked me to look for something I might want to buy on the internet. I chose a camera and looked at some sites. Then they told me to click on to a news website.

"Adverts for cameras immediately began popping up even though it was a completely unrelated site. It felt as though I was being spied on.

"And, according to web expert Dr Joss Wright, in a way, I was. He explained web browsers to me. This is the software that allows us to look at the internet. Every time we connect to a website, the browser puts a small piece of information on our computer called a cookie.

"These cookies build up a complete profile of our online activity and personal interests which are then traded by retailers and advertisers.

"There are now such things as 'retargeting companies' - which are paid by a third party to try to move appropriate consumers to their site. I'd never even heard of them yet apparently they are making hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

"In the spring, new laws will start to be enforced so that websites will need our consent before using cookies to retrieve and store our personal data. This will at least give us a say in who profits from our information." he added.

The programme is likely to bring the issue that most companies have been talking about to the wider public ahead of a one-year delay in implementing the new EU law he mentioned. The new law will apply to all companies with websites. Sitemorse offers products that will, among many other things, allow users to track their cookies - including our free Snapshot tool. For more information on the background to the legislation and how users can keep track of their cookies, see the Cookie Reports website.

The programme, On Hold, airs at 8pm on January 17 on Channel Four. The full article is available on the Daily Mail website.

Major pharmaceutical company sites don't do well in latest survey

2011-12-15T09:07:47Z

The websites of most major pharmaceutical companies are not rated highly in a new benchmark of the Global Life Sciences sector from Sitemorse.

Out of a total of 225 global pharmaceutical companies surveyed, the websites of Pfizer, Wyeth, Merck, Baxter, Solvay and Bristol-Myers Squibb all come in the bottom 20, while names you may never have heard of like Anergis, Lumavita AG, Max Zeller Sohne and Piramal Healthcare are rated very highly.

Full details of the survey will be released on December 21, but anyone who wants to know how their company's site performed can contact us for a no-charge summary.

'Bricks and Clicks' vital for retailers, says John Lewis

2011-12-11T18:29:34Z

Despite the gloom and doom surrounding the retail industry, the MD of John Lewis thinks the answer is "bricks and clicks" - a strong web presence supporting a good physical stores network.

Andy Street told the Telegraph the retailer's fastest growing area is its "pick and collect" initiative, allowing customers to order online and pick up products in the shops.

"Over the autumn we have been about 75pc up year- on-year on that so it's a huge change in how people want to transact," says Mr Street.

"To do that well you need a brilliant website and the convenience of shops. It's all about behaviour; how our customers want to behave and what we have got to do is make it easy for them to behave in the way that we want.

"About 50pc of our online transactions involve research in the shops and vice-versa. So it is not one channel or the other; it is the two hand in glove and this is why we have an advantage." he added.

Read the full interview from the Telegraph.

John Lewis's website was one of those tested in the Sitemorse UK Retail Top 500 survey earlier this month and it's fair to say did not score highly.

But we agree with Andy Street's analysis of how important the online component of selling has become.

Recent research showed around a quarter of users will drop out of an online sale because of technical issues. And 82% of consumers said that if a business' website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web - or even in- store.

Yet recent Sitemorse benchmarks show many online retailers either do not know, or choose to ignore this, with some of the best-known high street names performing very badly on quality issues.

Now you can share your snaps with the world

2011-12-05T07:52:19Z

Sitemorse's cool free Snapshot tool, which allows you to check any web page for broken links, over-large files, missing images, unwanted cookies and a host of other potential problems, can now be easily shared with colleagues and friends.

First you need to get Snapshot by going to http://snapshot.sitemorse.com/ . The tool is free and does not require a software download.

When you run Snapshot on any page you can click on the top left hand of the page to send your findings via email. The recipient can then click on the link to see your audit summary. This is a very simple way to share findings and potential errors or to bring items needing correction with colleagues.

Performance is not just for Formula One

2011-11-30T17:05:54Z

Performance is a crucial issue for anyone who runs a company website - the rewards can be great and the consequences of failure can even impact the organisation's 'bottom line' financial performance.

But a website's performance does not just depend on the power of the web server involved. There are a number of elements that will affect the performance of any site, starting from the very first decisions made.

Managers with responsibility for operating a website should also beware of internal testing that can often mask performance issues - tools that are part of the content management system or run by the company's IT department often can see the website from the inside, rather than from the point of view of the end user.

At Sitemorse, we often liken the performance issue to a car . There is no point in comprehensively testing the performance of a car if it's running, for example, on the wrong type of fuel. Or if the wrong tyres are fitted. A flat tyre will hamper performance even more!

A website is only usually as good as its weakest link, so a badly-planned site, like a badly-designed car, is going to be left behind by its competitors before the end of the race.

Problems often come down to the same old things - bad links, images larger than necessary, poor code that makes the site work harder than it needs to.

Talking to potential clients, we are often surprised to hear they are not finding problems with their websites. Frankly, this issue is quite well-known, and we are not the only ones testing, and finding the same problems. One manager we spoke to recently said we must run our tests on their 'bad days' , but it does seem unlikely that major companies would allow the same level of carelessness in other important areas of communication, such as annual reports.

The real problem here is the nature of the web, a much more complicated operation than printing and distributing documents and literature, for example, where standards have been gradually built up over a long period.

Defining a precise colour for a brochure, for example by giving a pantone reference , is not feasible for the web, because the huge variety of monitor set ups, lighting etc mean that colours are experienced differently by different users.

The example holds for almost everything about a website - there are probably more contributors to a website than to any brochure, perhaps scattered internationally or across a wide area, using different set-ups, equipment, browsers, just to quote a few examples.

A good web manager knows a little about lots of things, and needs to develop his or her own way of developing checks on everything they are told from design and technical agencies, fellow employees, members of the IT and other specialist departments and even company management. Few have the big picture when it comes to a website, and there can be a tendency to not see the wood from the trees, particularly when all the messages are good ones ( such as, "our new site is online and breaking all records".

The Sitemorse Web Managers Toolkit provides hard evidence of problems and can be a very useful check for web managers and editors wanting to see their site from the users point of view but who don't want to spend their entire day clicking on links or running free tools over the site.

Our free Snapshot tool will warn you about performance issues found on any tested webpage. The Performance icon gives information of the elements of the page being tested that can affect load, such as large images, for example. Clicking this icon will give a more detailed report so the web content editor can make the necessary changes quickly - and then re-test the page to ensure the changes have fixed the problem. The free service can be extended to check for IP/trademark infringement and alert you to brand issues or spelling problems.

Snapshot is not a download but requires saving a small 'bookmarklet' - Get started with Snapshot.

Geoff Paddock is a web consultant who has managed corporate websites for ICI , Wolseley plc and a number of less well-known clients.

Swiss Banking Websites - just like Clockwork

2011-11-23T11:37:00Z

Discreet, quiet and efficient - many Swiss banking groups apply the same methodology to their websites as they do to their business, revealed in new research from Sitemorse.

Our Sitemorse Q4 2011 survey of the websites of more than 200 Swiss Banks found a very high standard at the top of the survey, with 35 of those benchmarked classed as error-free. Around 50 per cent of the websites checked were in the acceptable to good range, a higher proportion than in other sectors recently surveyed by Sitemorse.

Heading the ranking in this most discreet area - Swiss banks do not tend to be household names - is Geneva-based Banque Bauer (Suisse) SA.

Banque Bauer - motto "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children" - was also at the top of the benchmark in the third quarter. The bank, formerly Banque Artesia was formed after a buyout by the Schuppli family in 2003 and is today the number one Geneva-based banking institution specializing in Family Office private banking services. In our survey, its website scored 8.89 out of a possible 10 marks. Details of how the other banks surveyed fared can be seen in our full survey roundup.

If your company's website is slapdash, what does that say about your business?

2011-11-18T10:08:20Z

More than fifteen years after the internet began to be a mass-market experience there are no longer any excuses for links that don't work, or pages that do not have titles.

Yet in a recent survey of the top 500 FTSE companies, Sitemorse still found well over two per cent of web pages that did not have a title, and well over 3 per cent failing basic functional tests.

Since a company's website is the first port of call for virtually all users nowadays, missing images and poor links can give a poor initial impression. After all, if an organisation's website is put together in a slapdash fashion, what does that say about the business itself?

Google and other search engines may not properly catalogue or index a site that contains HTML errors, and that can mean less users finding what they are looking for - and in the case of e-commerce sites, perhaps a failure of sales and the consequential hit to the company's bottom line.

Around a quarter of users, according to recent research, will duck out of an online sale because of technical issues. A massive 82% of consumers said that if a business' website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web - or even in- store.

Yet recent Sitemorse benchmarks show many online retailers either do not know, or choose to ignore this, with some of the best-known high street names performing very badly on quality issues.

Why do you need web estate governance?

2011-11-08T14:06:02Z

Can you imagine a major company that does not use the web to communicate with its investors, clients, suppliers and would-be employees?

The largest companies operating across many countries have enormous territories of data, some current - some, unfortunately, out of date- and much of it run by subsidiaries and outside agencies.

Web Estate Governance was a phrase that didn't exist a few years ago, but as the importance of web communications has risen, more and more functions within organisations now have a vested interest in getting their messages across.

And the politics doesn't end inside the company, because more and more external regulation and outside standards are now in the mix. From EU rules on cookies to UK accessibility laws, the list of things a website needs to cover grows almost by the week.

Having a proper methodology for managing the website is much more crucial now than ever before, and having the tools to support that is essential for any web manager who wants to manage his or her time properly.

As websites have themselves grown in sophistication a number of different solutions for managing their content have developed. Whereas once websites required managers to be skilled in HTML coding, first 'what you see is what you get' editors such as Adobe's Dreamweaver and then bespoke content management systems became the order of the day.

These changes allowed 'non-techie' users to develop websites - but a consequence was that web managers using them did not necessarily understand exactly how they worked. Perhaps something else was needed beyond the content management system to ensure all worked well.

Sitemorse is used by many web managers in organisations large and small through the process of planning a site, getting it online and then ensuring it meets all its targets.

Beginning as the tool of choice for those who wanted to ensure their site was free of broken links and code errors, through various versions the Sitemorse software 'engine' has grown and developed alongside the web to become something that can be used much more holistically as part of the planning process of determining what the site should achieve, to building it while ensuring it covers all the necessary bases around internal 'brand' compliance, to meeting current standards around code quality and speed while also meeting third-party requirements, law and regulation.

Sitemorse Sitemorse's Web Managers Toolkit was developed so writers and editors not necessarily skilled in writing HTML code could keep control of their sites from the outset. The tool works with any of the content management systems currently on the market and can be used to audit or test any web pages in development - whether they are on an internal development site or the internet itself.

At the development stage of a website, it can be easy for any developer to lose sight of the end product. Sitemorse provides a series of proven solutions to assist developers at each and every stage in the site building process Sitemorse CMS Integration (SCI) sits in your content management system; after you complete the page, we run our full suite of tests, checks and measures to verify your content is ready for the public. This includes checking that any email addresses and links are valid and work, and we can validate against specific brand rules and make you aware of any accessibility problems that exist on a new page.

Another great advantage of Sitemorse is that it works on external servers with nothing to download, so can be used alongside many different content management systems. Sitemorse looks at your site from the outside, rather than the inside, like your CMS, and can spot errors it fails to find.

A good website is a matter of degree...

2011-11-01T08:03:24Z

.. or so our first-ever benchmark of university and higher education websites in the UK would seem to prove.

Some colleges you might never have expected have the best-working sites, but we were surprised to see some of the better-know universities trailing in the table, especially with numbers of would-be students expected to drop next year due to higher fees.So we will be watching carefully to see if this is a trend that will be repeated in future benchmarks.

Top marks go to London's LCA Business School, Walsall College, Warrington Collegiate, and South Cheshire and Solihull Colleges, who were the top five in the survey. The first University in our table, Southampton-based Solent University, was 11th with a score of 6.8, closely followed by the Bishop Grossetest University College, Lincoln with 6.7. and the University Campus Suffolk (UCS) with 6.4.

Other high-scoring colleges included Hopwood Hall College in Manchester, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Farnborough College of Technology, and the Mid-Cheshire and Newcastle Colleges.

Websites won't be just tick-boxes thanks to new EU legislation

2011-10-13T20:17:13Z

A move to ban web users being tricked by 'cost traps' - meaning web traders have to disclose the total cost of a product or service - has been made into law by the EU.

Announcing the legislation had been passed, the European Commission cited the example of buying airline tickets online, when customers may have needed to actively decline optional extras such as travel insurance.

The new law means it will no longer be permitted to have 'pre ticked' click boxes on websites - users will need to accept any extras or inclusions.

The new legislation follows the recent changes to law on website 'cookies' requiring businesses to ensure users consent to receive cookies served through their website, having first provided them with clear disclosures about the purpose and use of those cookies.

Sitemorse will deliver a solution to advise and alert its subscribers of any instances where tick boxes are offered 'pre-ticked' on their websites within the next three weeks - allowing key sectors like retail time to ensure their house is fully in order before the Christmas sales push.

Lawrence Shaw, Sitemorse CEO commented: "Consumer protection is essential, and the EU is getting very focused on ensuring adequate safeguards are in place.

"Along with the rules around the consideration and advice of what cookies you have in place, being continually aware of exactly what on your site reduces the risk of unnecessary compliance exposure along with maximising conversations whilst delivering the best possible online experience" he added.

Website compliance is now a very fast-moving area, and website owners and managers often need help to keep up with changes. Sitemorse's agility and ability to continually to keep its website auditing engine abreast of the latest compliance and visitor needs offers its clients unrivalled 'web confidence".

Get your online shop in shape, it's that time of year again!

2011-10-10T08:59:21Z

OK - with nearly three full months to Christmas, we must be mad talking about the C-word already, but if you're a shopkeeper, the need for planning means that now is the time to be getting ready.

That's why you'll find many high street retailers have sneakily started to display stuffed reindeer and turkey trimmings at the back of their stores, even as the last dregs of Indian Summer has had us all sweltering over the last couple of weeks.

Online retailers had the best-ever Christmas last year, believe it or not, right in the middle of the worst recession of a generation, with more than 2.1 billion UK visits to retail websites, and 44% of Britain's online adult population spending a total of £2.8bn in internet purchases.

So, E-retailers, now's the time to think about a pre-Christmas website health check from Sitemorse.

A staggering 22 per cent of web users say they have not been able to complete purchases because of technical problems with websites, according to recent research, and that must mean an enormous amount of lost sales because of duff links, bad code and sites that are still, despite changes in the law, inaccessible to disabled users who make up a solid percentage of prospective online buyers.

Our most recent retail survey in September covering the 250 top global companies found still only a handful have error-free sites and standards actually appeared to have dropped since the previous survey three months before.

The start of the appearance of malware and phishing links in retail websites seem to indicate they are not being looked after properly by their owners - and that may mean the retailers involved will be paying via their cash registers for any neglect and consequential lost sales come Christmas Day.

Sitemorse offers independent, authoritative and accountable software to ensure the quality, compliance, performance, availability and compatibility of your web estate. Delivered as a web service , it not require any client setup or management, so retailers can swiftly be assured that their sites are ready to handle the high pre-Christmas traffic of the next few months.

You might be interested to read our recent retail surveys of the Global Top 250 companies and the UK retail top 500. And if you're a retailer wondering how much time you have to start improving your web presence, you might like this blog from Simon Heyes at Internet Retailing.

Great idea Facebook, but we were there first...

2011-10-05T10:12:00Z

We are delighted to see Facebook is to offer users some protection against malware and scammers and from next week users will be warned if they are about to click on a link to a malicious website. Such tactics can often trick users into sharing passwords or confidential information.

Sitemorse has been warning against the dangers of 'phishing' and malware for some time, and the threat has grown so that these malicious links are starting to creep into otherwise innocent corporate sites. The web is a very changeable picture, and what your company links to today could be changed tomorrow .

Next month we will be launching a new 'every page' link checking and report service - this is an upgrade which will available to all subscription clients, at no charge.

The service will run once a week and clients will be emailed a link to the online results and a PDF summarising the links, identifying those with issues and tracking improvements compared with previous reports and a rolling 3 month average.Along with looking at every link and building a link inventory, each link will also be checked against known malicious sites.

We are also planning an 'iPhone app', delivering weekly push notifications that identify the key links not working or those that are linking out to phishing or malware sites.