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.

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.

Supermarket Aldi is renowned for competitive prices, but in the week that Sitemorse finds it has the best working website of the global top 250 retailers, the company has also been given a major loyalty boost by its shoppers. 

Our quarterly Global Top 250 Retail Index, comparing the websites of top international companies, ranks Aldi first with a score just under eight out of a possible ten marks, ahead of nearest rival ICA of Norway. 

Both results show that Aldi is getting the basics right for in-store customers as well as for its many website users in the UK. 

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. It also scored highest for giving customers low prices. 

According to the magazine, Aldi customers are now the most loyal in the UK, overtaking high-end retailer Waitrose as the supermarket with the most unwavering support from shoppers. 

Sitemorse CEO Lawrence Shaw says Aldi's results show how things are changing for the dominant superbrands such as Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsburys. 

"It's great to see that their customers rank Aldi number one in the Grocer survey covering both quality and prices.  Getting the basics right for customers is most important, but it's also essential online - and Aldi have proved it with a top slot across in-store and digital. 

"We regularly compare the websites of the top retail companies both in the UK and around the world and Aldi's site has scored consistently well, as have other brands such as Spar. Because they and Aldi are most associated with value for money, they are perhaps not the brands you would most expect to have the best websites in their sectors" he added. 

The Sitemorse Global Top 250 Retail Index was published in April 2013 exclusively for the World Retail Congress. As well as Aldi, Norway's ICI AB, Alliance Boots and Spar were high flyers. US retailer Nordstrom was the biggest climber in the survey, and Spain's Mercadona was ranked highest on accessibility. 

The rising cost of higher education plus extra competition between universities and colleges means educational websites have to work harder to help attract the best candidates. 

So it's good news that our quarterly assessment of the websites of universities and higher education establishments once again shows improvement, with four universities in the top ten websites tested, and a general trend of university websites moving up our table covering nearly 300 university and college sites. 

The second Sitemorse Universities Index of 2013 spotlights quality and efficiency across the websites of the higher learning sector.  

Congratulations once again to University Campus Suffolk (UCS) which has held on to the top spot it managed in our previous two surveys in October 2012 and February this year.Second in our league table this time is Crewe-based South Cheshire College and third is is Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln. 

See the survey details (link is above) to find out how your university's website performed in our tests.

A raft of US retailers have enjoyed strong performances from their online stores in the first quarter of 2013, with six major merchants now close to gaining a place in the first 20 of the table of Top 250 global websites tested exclusively for the World Retail Congress 2013 by Sitemorse.

Supermarket Aldi that retains its top spot with a score of 7.98/10 and ICA takes second place, having climbed 25 places since the last survey in 2012.

Also joining the party is upmarket US retailer Nordstrom , one of this quarter's biggest risers having climbed 130 places to 25^th spot with a score of 5.12, which compares with its score of only 2.57 in Q4 of 2012. Spain's Mercadona chain scores the best on accessibility, with an overall score in this area of 8/10.

The World Retail Congress takes place in Paris next October and Sitemorse CEO Lawrence Shaw has been asked to join the judging panel for the fourth year in succession.

More information about our benchmark can be seen on our website by following this link: Sitemorse Top 250 Global retailers Q1 2013.

No less than 40% of  would-be university students pick their chosen seat of learning by looking at university websites.

And with recent rises in UK tuition fees, competition from the creation of free massive open online courses, and recent statistics from UCAS revealing an 8.4% drop in UK student applications since November 2011, universities and colleges have to work harder than ever to meet rising student expectations and ensure their institutions stand out from the rest.

We have noted real improvements in the standard of higher education sites since we started our Index nearly two years ago, and the latest benchmark will be published on April 16th. 

If you're involved in one of the 300 or so higher education websites in the UK - or indeed a current or prospective student - be sure to see our report to find out how well your university or college websites performs against its peers.

The threat to businesses from cyber-criminals using sophisticated, advanced 'malware' is increasing, according to online security firms. And that means a very real problem for web managers.

News and analysis website V3 quotes a number of recent reports saying criminals are targeting businesses once every three minutes with advanced malware capable of avoiding detection from traditional tools such as firewalls and anti-virus software.

Security firm FireEye says 'spear phishing' - a technique that looks to dupe its victims into downloading malware by sending messages using common business terms designed to entice them to click on a malicious email file attachment or web link - remains the most common attack strategy for getting malware into an enterprise.

And security agency Europol reports that the increased success rate of cyber attacks is doubly dangerous, as organised crime groups are using them to fund other darker 'real world' activities.

Some of the malware currently online can even be activated as users move a mouse, a tactic which could dupe current 'sandbox'  detection systems (isolated environments where suspicious code is executed out of harm's way)  since the malware doesn't generate any activity.

Of course, no web manager would knowingly link to malware, but links do change and issues can arise with links within a site that is not regularly checked. When you embed code to third party websites in your pages (for example, links via advertising banners), you are relying on the third party being responsible for their own security.

Earlier this year Cheltenham Borough Council was hit by a major malware attack that caused large-scale disruption to its services, including online council tax payments and the Police and Crime Commissioner elections.

Press reports say it took the Council a week to realise the extent of the infection, when staff decided to undertake a complete scan of systems.

The resulting IT disruption reportedly caused the Council's online council tax system to become unavailable for three days and caused a glitch that delayed counting of ballots cast during the Police and Crime Commissioner elections. Staff were also unable to access email and internal systems for three days.

Users of Sitemorse products Governisation and the Web Manager's Toolkit with responsibility for managing sites can be confident that malware problems will be quickly found - in an earlier post we detailed how we protect against such dangers.

When it comes to efficient websites, the stable managed by the Countryside Council for Wales has gained something of a reputation for excellence.

The Welsh Government's statutory advisor on sustaining natural beauty, wildlife and the opportunity for outdoor enjoyment in Wales and its inshore waters has a impressive record, placing its family of sites within the top ten of our Central Government Index on a consistent basis.

Whether analysing site performance, automatic accessibility or coding quality - the CCW web methodology has now seen four of their websites beat all the other major UK offices of state to top the Sitemorse Central Government Index.

Our latest (Q1 2013) Index finds the CCW has taken the first, second, third and fourth spots in the benchmark, by any standards an amazing performance and one we have never seen before in any of the sectors we survey. And we have been benchmarking leading sites for over a decade.

It's all change for the team at CCW, as the organisation itself is being replaced [after Easter] with a new body - Natural Resources Wales. While CCW's microsite family - including Plant for Wildlife, Green Wales and The Countryside Code - will remain online for a while, the main CCW site will soon drop from the Index.

Web Manager Cameron Edwards and his team will be managing the new NRW site, though their remarkable achievement in website efficiency will surely be a difficult one to beat. We talked to Cameron a few months back about his methods, and wrote about them in a previous blog.

Using Sitemorse's service (now rebadged as the Web Manager's Toolkit) has always been an important element in the CCW strategy, enabling Cameron and his small team to quickly prioritise changes and improvements that need to be done to the site on a regular basis.

Hats off to Cameron and his team for a remarkable achievement. Like many, we'll be watching with great interest as they move on to new challenges in the NRW web project. Will the new site, one wonders, set out to match such remarkable standards?

Many organisations underestimate the number of websites they control by an amazing 41 per cent, according to our research. But Sitemorse has a unique service coming that will accurately map the entire content of a web domain and present it graphically.

Venobia will allow its users to map out their web assets, including social and mobile applications, allowing for accurate strategic management of web domains along with cost savings.

There's an online demo of Venobia representing an example web presence.

To get the best out of it you'll need to view it in a modern browser and be prepared for the example to build.

Hovering over individual websites with the mouse will provide information - green dots are operational and red ones are not working correctly, so it gives an immediate impression of how functional the whole web presence is.

The service can tell how many sites are linked to each other and the web presence can be represented in a variety of ways.

Watch this space for more information about Venobia.

Supermarket chain Aldi managed to hold on to its position at the head of the table of the UK's Top 25 leading drinks retailing websites for March despite losing ground to second-placed Spar (UK), currently working hard to boost its wine and beer offer.

The German supermarket scored 7.26 out of 10 compared with a better performance last month of 8.34, but it still held off Spar (UK) with its score of 7.08. They both came under pressure from third-placed The Whisky Shop that scored 6.74 versus 6.54 in February.

The rankings of the top UK drinks retailers' websites are produced exclusively for Retailinsider.com by Sitemorse. 

Following years of growth and favourable market trends, the global life sciences industry now finds itself facing a challenging "new normal." And that means online channels for getting company messages across have never been more important. 

According to consultants Deloitte, a raft of new conditions, including changing health care landscape, expiring patents and generic competition, pricing pressures, heightened regulatory scrutiny, expansion into emerging markets, increasing alliances and acquisitions, and a persistent economic slowdown are prompting global life sciences companies to adopt new business models designed to counter slowing sales growth and declining profitability and position them for success in 2013 and beyond. 

Sitemorse has been benchmarking the websites of around 200 companies in the global life science sector on a quarterly basis for some years, and our results find the companies with the most efficient websites are not the multinational giants but usually the smaller, more focused businesses targeting one sector of the market. 

According to Deloitte's latest Global Life Sciences Outlook report, "A dramatic shift is taking place in the type of products coming out of life sciences company research labs - the reality of fewer billion-dollar blockbusters is being replaced by a focus on developing targeted treatments, which requires that companies invent and bring to market more products to fill the pipeline and generate comparable revenue levels." 

The top five companies whose websites take the honours in our latest Index will most likely not be known to you by name. Siegfried AG's site scores highest with a very creditable score of 8.5 out of a possible ten marks in our automated testing. Siegfried, headquartered in Zofingen, Switzerland, has been a consistent performer in Sitemorse tests. The company was second in our Autumn 2012 survey and so moves up one place. 

Second place goes to Novimmune, a Geneva-based drug discovery and development company focused on the creation of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of inflammatory diseases and immune-related disorders. The website's score of 8.1 means it moves from last survey's top spot to second place this time. 

In third place this time with a score of 8.1 in our automated testing is Vifor Pharma, a Swiss-based company that can date its history back to 1872 and which has expertise in the fields of iron deficiency, infectious diseases and consumer healthcare. Vifor has risen 15 places since the last Index. 

Sitemorse benchmarks the websites of the top companies in this sector four times a year, and we are pleased to once again see some of the better-known Pharma names such as Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG and Eli Lilley Schweiz in the top thirty performers. 

With three major property and land management companies in the top six and one developer jumping up our table by a massive 290 places, it's a fair bet that property companies are the big news in our first survey of the FTSE All Share company websites of 2013. 

The FTSE All share index features some of the best-known companies traded on the London Stock Exchange, and many of the 500 or so compared in our new Index are household names. As we so often find, however, the best-known names don't always have the best-working websites, despite usually having more staff and budget. 

Birmingham-based St. Modwen Properties, the UK's leading regeneration specialist, scored 9.14 out of a possible 10 in our automated testing and moved up two places to the top of our index this time. The UK's largest commercial property company, Land Securities is our second rated site this time, with a score of 8.9/10 and a move of three places up the table. 

Water and sewage company United Utilities takes third place, with a score of 8.3/10 and a rise of 42 places since Q4 2012. The Warrington-based company supplies water to seven million people in the North West of England and uses more than 42,000 kilometres of water pipes from Cumbria to Cheshire.

The really big climbers in this survey are headed by leading property company Development Securities PLC, who specialise in commercial real estate. Responsible for the iconic Paddington Central development, one of London's largest urban renewal projects, Development Securities PLC rose 290 places in our survey to end up in 111^th place. Other big risers included Capita Group PLC (up 287) and Hochschild Mining PLC (up 285).

The Q1 2013 FTSE All Share Index can be seen on the Sitemorse website, worth checking to see how your own organisation's website has performed. A full press release can also be seen on the site.

Digital designer - Permanent role or contract on retainer

Job Description

We are looking for a talented and creative professional to be involved with all aspects of design and creativity at Sitemorse.

The right candidate will have:

* a portfolio of graphic work covering web, print and digital media,
* confidence to challenge and expand the brief,
* attention to detail,
* ability to deliver original and professional designs,
* commercial experience in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator,
* flexibility to quickly create mock-ups and wire-frames,
* experience in creating responsive and valid HTML/XHTML and CSS,
* knowledge of accessibility and WCAG guidelines,
* working knowledge of jQuery and JavaScript in general,

Bonus experience, but not essential:

* the Python framework Django,
* working on a Unix-like command line operating system,
* advanced knowledge of jQuery.

This role will integrate and work alongside our in-house team of developers and may extend to technical documentation and handling support for our clients.

An excellent level of written and spoken English is necessary, as is an organised approach to note taking and design. The job has the option of home base although you may be required to attend occasional meetings in Central London.

Contact techjobs@sitemorse.com with an up-to-date CV if you're interested, along with a link to a portfolio of your work.

Website owners using Sitemorse's Web Manager's Toolkit service have everything they need to ensure a great experience for visitors and to reduce risks around compliance or failure. 

Many of our clients use the service to keep track of a number of sites, but have other websites in their portfolio that are not monitored. 

But now clients can take advantage of a special offer to add additional sites, with no limit on site size or the service received. 

If you are an existing client you can add an extra site to your service for just £500 a year, and for every two sites added in this way, you will receive a third site at no charge. 

The offer includes all modules (PDF, email, performance, inventory and priority fixes) and can be easily set up by sending a confirmation email with the web addresses of the sites that should be added. 

Caroline Crosby, Head of Client Services said: "Digital governance is no longer a nice to have but an absolute requirement, and all websites need to be compliant with relevant legislation and error-free if they are to provide a great experience for their users. We want to make it easy for our clients to cover their whole web estate in this way, and at time of tight budget controls we'd like to offer a little help to enable them to do so".  

An offer is also available to Sitemorse clients using Governisation, who will be contacted directly over the next few days.

Poorly-constructed council websites can cost local authorities money because enquiries handled online are cheaper than those dealt with by phone or face to face.

That's one conclusion from the "Better Connected" report on council websites to which Sitemorse has contributed, published just a few days ago.

The report, from the Society of IT Management (Socitm) revealed that there is huge variation in the ease of use of websites and finding the right information - for instance, services relating to getting help at home for older people from adult social care services.

According to one reviewer, "I got confused between home care, care homes, home help and then Service Directories. Few councils provide strong descriptions of the service coupled with clear instructions of how to request and carry out an assessment."

Another complaint was about having to register before being allowed to comment and one reviewer said that "easier to use and more customisable help pages from within the task are needed."

Yet another issue was raised regarding objecting to a planning application: "I was shocked by the number of councils which did not have information on how to object to a planning application and what are the grounds I can object on. This is an area which can be easily improved with some thought and a few links."

Socitm has warned that "In harsh economic times, councils must always remember that poor website usability and failed web enquiries cause councils unnecessary cost."

Sitemorse and Socitm have been working together for more than a decade, and it's an important partnership. "Our survey is now in its fifteenth year and has been supported by Sitemorse for ten of those years. In the time we have been working with them, Sitemorse has become a very recognised provider of 'web confidence', and it's great to be supported by their unique capability" Martin Greenwood of Socitm told us.

Meanwhile our own Index of Local Government websites for the first quarter of 2013 concludes that local authority sites tested are generally improving. You can see how your own local authority's website scored by following the link.