Sitemorse Blog

Sitemorse has been carrying out quarterly benchmarks of the banking sector in Switzerland for the last three years, and our latest Index benchmark looks at more than 200 to measure how well their websites work .

Although the bank we marked top this time has only been around for eight years old, the second-rated bank is 200 years old and based in a Swiss canton between Lakes Zurich, Lucerne and the Alps. With full marks for function - meaning the site has very few missing links and errors that can often give web users problems - the Sparkasse Schwyz site also scores highly on accessibility, performance and code quality. 

With many people banking online and using the internet for research comparing accounts, it's vital that any bank's website work as efficiently as possible and gives the very best customer experience. This is particularly the case where clients are probably based many miles away from their banks, and an atmosphere of total trust is necessary.

Our Q2 Swiss Banks Index can now be seen on  the Sitemorse website.

Our quarterly Retail Top 500 Index isn't published for a few more days, but one story has already hit the headlines in the online retail media.

Little known Yorkshire-based family-owned pharmacy chain HI Weldrick dramatically shot up our table of the best performing websites in Q2 with a climb of no less than 423 places.

The pharmacy climbed to eighth spot, marking a dramatic change in its fortunes this year.

Its score of 7.10 out of a possible ten marks leaves it close to a top 5 spot where another relative minnow, Greenhalghs Craft Bakery holds fifth place with a score only marginally more at 7.36. This is still some way behind the new leader this quarter as DFS regains the top spot with a score of 9.52.

More information can be seen on the Retail Bulletin website, which previews the Index.

Full details of the Index, which has some dramatic falls for some well known high street names as well as success stories, will be published on the Sitemorse website on 23rd May. If you work in the retail trade then don't miss it.

Listening to the experience of your website users and making sure your web team are more flexible in their attitude will immediately improve your online sales, as this real-life example we encountered recently proves.

We were simply trying to book a meeting room online, simple enough, and something many businesses do every day. The booking, for a short meeting in an outer-London venue, came to an abrupt halt when we encountered a "page not found" error. Annoying.....

Not to be discouraged, we went through the booking procedure again, only to encounter the same error once more. Whatever we did, we couldn't get around the error and complete the booking.

A conversation with the (nameless, to save their blushes) firm's web technical manager elicited an unexpected response. "That can't happen" he told us. "You must be doing something wrong".

After going elsewhere to book our room, we dropped a line via email to the company's MD and were even more amazed at his dismissive attitude. "I'm assured the problem you found can't happen on our site" he told us.

OK, don't believe us, but the error we inadvertently discovered might turn out to be quite significant - we wouldn't be too surprised if their monthly bookings are a bit down next time. Complacency can be extremely dangerous to a company's bottom line.

Amazed to hear there are people who are totally uninterested in listening to their customers? We hear the MD's "It can't happen here" line quite often, nearly always from people who are well removed from the service they are selling.

Thankfully, there are many organisations around who are interested in the experience of their website users. And a lot of them are using our services to discover any problems on their sites before their own customers do. Here's one example of how our deep level monitoring benefited a client who didn't even know they had a problem.

Sitemorse's services help our clients monitor the journey, replay the screens and look at what's actually being delivered to visitors, rather than what your staff assure you is being provided. As the web becomes more complicated, with many organisations having fixed and mobile websites, small changes in systems linked to your web presence can have a significant effect.

Our 'journey monitoring' can keep an eye on what your customers are experiencing and immediately alert you if that experience drops below par.

An efficient, well-run web site speaks volumes about any organisation. But more and more, it seems that a well-governed website can be the barometer of corporate health.

Most senior managers these days realise that a website is not just a shop window for any organisation, it's an essential carrier of a brand's reputation as well. But how many of them actually realise that their organisation's website mirrors their success in the marketplace?

The term 'web governance' seems to have caught on, and now lots of people are talking about it. But rather like the early days of social media, it's seen as still very much the province of the people at the sharp end - in this case, the organisation's web teams.

Governance 'guru' Shane Diffily puts it well in his recent online piece about the analytics of web governance. "No-one who does not work on a Web Team generally cares much about the basics of high-quality governance. In fact, most do not even notice the effort that goes into supervising a website until something goes wrong, e.g. a poorly resourced Web Team seizes up due to overwork."

Sitemorse has been benchmarking the websites of organisations in the public and private sector for more than a decade, and our quarterly Index reports make for interesting reading in all categories. We think many organisations can't see the wood for the trees when it comes to their websites, and are all too often hampered by poor-performing suppliers, non-compliant legacy content or content management systems that often fail to spot errors affecting user experience.

Our results show how effectively and efficiently a website runs, and give an accurate verdict of how a user will find a site. The Index reports covering the retail sector have been particularly interesting.

Our tests have pointed to companies such as DFS, Aldi and Spar having particularly successful sites, returning scores of around 9 out of 10 on customer experience.

In 2009, for example, HMV's site was rated 25th in our UK Retail Index with a score of just under 6 out of ten. Argos was in 18th place (6.1/10), Jessops 13th (6.5/10). Electrical retailer Comet was in 40th place with a score of 5.3.Waterstones, in 46th place, scored 5/10.

By the first quarter of this year the HMV site was scored at 1.5 out of 10 and the company had slumped to near the bottom of our table. Argos was 331st, scoring 2.6. Comet had already disappeared (but the previous Index in the last quarter of 2012 rated them 283rd with a score of 3.1). Waterstones had dropped to the very bottom of the table, with a score of just 1.1.

All of these companies have reportedly struggled in the marketplace. Could their online malaise have something to do with their real-world woes? Could their management teams have taken their eyes off the web ball amid the distractions of trading difficulties?

It's interesting that media coverage of the Comet failure pointed at a lack of understanding of the online world as one of the reasons for the company's decline.

Turning to the companies who do well in our Index surveys, it's interesting to see that the ones making the business pages for the wrong reasons tend to gravitate towards the middle or bottom of the table.

Those at the top are often being praised or shown to be particularly successful in other areas of business.

• Supermarket Aldi, for example : a survey of 1,200 shoppers for The Grocer found that Aldi scored highest for supplying good quality products at good prices - the key driver of customer loyalty. According to the magazine, Aldi customers are now the most loyal in the UK, overtaking Waitrose.

• Furniture maker DFS have opened four new stores so far this year and announced sales up more than 7 per cent in March. CEO Ian Filby, announcing the results, said the company had also "further enhanced our successful and growing online business".

• Convenience store chain Spar , who have performed particularly well in our quarterly Index of the top 250 International retailers as well as our UK surveys, currently operate 2,600 stores and boast more than £2.6 billion retail sales a year. Spar has one of the highest spontaneous consumer brand-awareness scores in the retail industry, a position no doubt helped by having one of the highest-rated websites.

Interestingly, some managers at senior level are indicating that a successful online strategy is critical to their success. John Lewis MD Andy Street spoke earlier this year about their "bricks and clicks" strategy. The company's websites are steadily improving in both our UK and international retail Index reports.

Tiling and flooring retailer Topps Tiles reported revenues grew by 1.2% to £177.7 million in the year to 29 September 2012.Head of Marketing Beth Boulton told us her aim was "to develop an inspirational website and an online presence which reflects our market leading position. The focus on the website has widened in the last twelve months as we recognise the customer journey often starts with visiting the website first. "she added. The company's marketing team have made a number of improvements to the website over the past three months which has led to the big improvement in their rating by Sitemorse.

Dr. Jeremy Howard, CEO of drinks company Slurp Group, went further and was quoted in a news item to say the company's main objective is to join the Wine Society and Oddbins in the top 50 of the Sitemorse top 500 best performing retail websites. The company's website, he said had been redesigned and reconstructed from the bottom up - a "stupendous effort" for the web team, and a milestone towards the company's aim of being the clear market leader in online drinks sales in the UK.

Do the official numbers for the UK's growth fail to capture recent very high levels of growth in the digital economy? That's the question being asked following a recent report that says Britain may be the biggest e-commerce market in the world.

Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph, thinks reports of double and triple-dip recession ignore much digital data, and quotes some reports which back up the theory.

If it's true, then every organisation with a website should once again look at the standard and quality of their web presence, perhaps using the regular Sitemorse Index benchmarks as a start-point.

All too often we find, while spotlighting good practice in web governance, that the majority of websites in any one sector, whether it be retail, FTSE or even universities and police forces, are far from excellent and the best-known organisations don't always have the best sites.

Warner's Telegraph piece, published over the Bank Holiday weekend, makes interesting reading and suggests by 2015 the digital economy may account for a tenth of the UK total, making it bigger than construction, transport and the utilities.

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page, developed by Prof Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at Cern.

The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web.

Two decades on,Tim Berners-Lee is still very active in web matters is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to 'lead the Web to its full potential'.

The first web browser was not as primitive as might be expected, had graphical capabilities and users could edit pages directly - a feature only allowed in browsers these days via content management systems.

Over the last two decades, the web has changed so many things, not least the communications capabilities of organisations. Now it's mandatory to have a website, but it's interesting that the ideas that they should have sensible governance systems rather than the "Wild West" environments still so often found on the web has taken the best part of 20 years to evolve also, despite the best efforts of "TimBL" as he is sometimes known.

Sitemorse has been around for more than half of the WWW's journey so far, and is doing its bit to promote web governance and to improve standards of websites for many organisations.

It seems to us the priorities now are providing a great user experience, to ensure your web visitors stay on your site and want to come back, protecting your brand online , reducing the ever-present risks of today's web, and supporting the many web managers striving to do the best possible job against a complex and fast-moving background.

We all need to be Web Confident these days, and we salute Sir Tim and the other pioneers who made it all possible.

A blog item a few weeks ago talked about the increasing threat from 'digital wildfires'- online misinformation that's out of control.

And yesterday there was a perfect example of what can go wrong, when a false tweet from a trusted news organization sent the US stock market into freefall.

The 143-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average came after hackers sent a message from the Twitter feed of the Associated Press, saying the White House had been hit by two explosions and that Barack Obama was injured. The fake tweet, which was immediately corrected by Associated Press employees, caused a sensation on Twitter and in the stock market.

The market recovered within a few minutes of the misunderstanding, but the incident left traders catching their breath and speculating once more about their vulnerability to breaking news in the age of social media.Many organisations are now linking social media channels of all kinds to their own web presence, with the risks that digital wildfires can spread into more 'official' channels.

It's vital, if "digital wildfires" are not to spread, that companies and organisations know and control their own content and keep a watchful eye across their own web presence for links that may have crept in through social media to inflammatory material elsewhere.

Tools such as the Governisation service from Sitemorse can help reduce risk across the web presence of even a very large organisation. Governisation - a blend of governance and optimisation -handles multiple rules governing corporate, regulatory, and web issues with automated issue prioritisation and distribution at the point of production as well as live site monitoring. Governisation reduces manual time, improves processes and protects the organisation's online investment around the clock.

The loss of a small number of incoming emails can be one of the worst 'hidden' issues for any website manager. 

If happened to your site, right now it can be causing sales enquiries to be lost before you were aware of them - with consequential  brand damage and lost confidence. 

How can the Sitemorse Web Manager's Toolkit help to ensure that the incoming requests you are spending money on developing are protected? The importance of keeping more than a keen eye on the detail that's sitting behind your email service.

Over the decade or more that Sitemorse has been around we have carried out a mind-boggling amount of checks on behalf of our clients (As of today 16,821,314,729). 

But this month we were reminded once again how important the service can sometimes be. 

Monitoring a client's website, we found an issue with an email address. This kind of error can be problematical, especially for larger companies. Clearly if an email address is faulty, mail can get lost, and it can be days or weeks before the problem is spotted, potentially affecting any organisation's bottom line. 

Yet when we sent a test email, it got through and was received by the client. 

Some detective work at our end found that our original diagnosis of a fault was correct and that a small - but potentially crucial amount of email sent using the link on the client website would be lost. 

Over to Sitemorse Technical Director, Jon Ribbens: "Suppose they were losing 1%, or even 0.1%, of emails. This would perhaps not be detected manually - even if people occasionally failed to get emails they were expecting, they would not think it necessarily part of any pattern, and may well blame the sender's ISP or human error. 

"So without Sitemorse the problem would go undetected for potentially many years, and over time some of those lost emails are bound to be highly important. Lost customer goodwill from unanswered queries or complaints, or lost orders, or bigger deals lost or delayed due to missing messages... or even perhaps lawsuits prejudiced due to non-receipt of notices." Jon added. 

The case served as a reminder to us how detailed our monitoring and diagnostic capabilities really are. Our services can find problems that manual testing will not necessarily find, in a fraction of the time it takes (Even an average sized website can take more than six days to check manually). 

We reckon we have spent around 25 man-YEARS of research to get our diagnostics to where they are today. Over that time, Sitemorse has developed a unique level of automation that views every single element of every page as a visitor would, checking infrastructure and software, assessing any third- party technology, and noting anything else that needs attention. 

We automatically review our findings and prioritise them to ensure anything affecting user experience, search or potential risk exposure can be swiftly corrected, right down to the line of code that needs fixing. 

For true 'Web Confidence' you need to be totally in control of your website, and aware of what's needed to make it reach its potential.

The Sitemorse Index is the longest established and independent authoritative website survey and ranking across a number of sectors - looking at the online capability of the main website available for each organisation in the sector.

The Index covers sectors such as FTSE All Share, Global 250 and UK 500 retailers, Universities, Local and Central Government, Global Life Sciences and more.

The only way to ensure that your website is offering the best possible visitor experience, be certain Google is accurately indexing your site and ensure you are on the correct side of compliance is to continually validate content, check links, review templates and test the delivery infrastructure of every page on the site.

To put this in context, checking an 'average' site properly takes around 6.5 days manually and a large ecommerce site potentially upwards of 270 days!

Until now it has not been really been practical (or possible, within most web budgets) to do this. Although many senior managers may think this is being done on their sites already, so many websites have issues that it's clear that these checks are simply not being done.

Over some 25 man-years of R&D, Sitemorse has developed a unique level of automation that views every single element of every page as a visitor would, checking infrastructure and software, assessing any third- party technology, and noting anything else that needs attention.

Sitemorse automatically reviews its findings and prioritises them to ensure anything affecting user experience, search or exposing you to risk can be swiftly corrected, down to the line of code that needs fixing.

For true Web Confidence you need to be in control of your website, and aware of what's needed it to make it reach its potential.

The Index gives a regularly-updated snapshot of each sector we cover, and that's an opportunity for every organisation to firstly see their start point and then how they can improve against their peers.

Recently we have had organisations like Leeds Building Society, supermarket Aldi, fashion store Anoushka London, Vale of Glamorgan Council, the Met Office and University Campus Suffolk at the top of our surveys.

The paint was barely dry on the new Police Scotland HQ before the force's equally-new website leapfrogged its way into second place in the coveted Sitemorse Police Force Index. 

Police Scotland was formed on 1 April through the merger of the all eight Scottish territorial forces and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, and the organisation now has one single website.

In our second Police Index of 2013, we spotlight the websites of Cleveland, Police Scotland, and the North Wales Police as being the best from a group of more than 50 UK forces in total. 

Get full access to the survey. 

The Police Scotland site has only been in existence for a few short weeks, so immediately getting to the top end of our table is quite an achievement, even building on the success of previous Scottish high scorers like Dumfries and Galloway. Given that many of the major police forces don't do so well in our benchmarks, this major new organisation that has taken over from eight regional forces has made its mark from day one. 

Well done to the top forces in particular for setting a great standard for others to follow. And our message to those police forces that did not do so well is - why not get an external viewpoint on how well your site performs? We are always prepared to share more detailed information on our results.