Sitemorse Blog

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.