It's pleasing to see some well-known pharmaceutical names are moving up the table in the latest Sitemorse benchmark of the websites of major companies in the life science sector.

This survey remains the most consistent in scores and recorded rises and falls tend to be smaller than in other surveys we carry out. The top performers this time have scores that are unchanged, a tribute to their consistency. It's good to see some well-known names towards the top, so well done Sanofi Aventis, Eli Lilley and Sandoz.  

Highest of the big names is Eli Lilley's Swiss site, which has risen 9 places to take 14th position. Behind them is the recently-introduced Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG website which has moved from 18^th to 17th position with an unchanged score of 6.51, the same mark as the previous two surveys.

Cutting-edge pharmaceutical company Geneva-based Novimmune - leading the war on the treatment of inflammatory diseases and immune-related disorders - keeps top position, with an overall score of 8.1 of a possible ten marks in the benchmark.

Taking second place in the survey is Siegfried AG with 7.8, a riser of ten places. Siegfried, headquartered in Zofingen, Switzerland, has been a consistent performer in Sitemorse tests. The company operates worldwide and has around 800 employees manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients. 

Third is Newron Pharmaceuticals S.p.A, whose mission is discover, develop and commercialise novel drugs to treat diseases of the Central Nervous System (CNS) such as Parkinson's. Maintaining an overall score of 7.6 this time, Newron have been consistently at the top of our global life science benchmark tables for the last couple of years.

The FTSE All share index features some of the best-known companies traded on the London Stock Exchange, so it's always fascinating to see how their websites perform. Unfortunately, when we benchmark the sites using the unique Sitemorse platform, all too often we see a world turned upside down, with some of the household names near the bottom of the table. 

Premier league brewer and pub restaurant operator Marston's PLC has maintained its position as top website . The world's largest communications company, WPP, has resumed its place as second in the benchmark with a move of seven places up the table since September. And Birmingham-based St. Modwen Properties, the UK's leading regeneration specialists, scored 9.14 and dropped just a single place to take third place. 

It's just beneath the top ten sites that things get really interesting this time. In eleventh place is Oxford Instruments plc, up a staggering 420 places since September with a score of 7.66 - congratulations to them. Just behind them Blooomsbury Publishing Group is up 118 with a score of 7.64. Student property specialists Unite have also risen 118 places, to take 24^th place. Other big risers this time include Anglo Pacific Group PLC (321), Genus PLC (242), Jupiter European Opps Trust PLC (211) and UK Mail Group PLC (208). 

The success of the companies with the most efficient sites counterpoints the mediocre performance of some of the FTSE top names. More than 320 companies scored less than five out of ten on our criteria this time. Although the very best sites in this survey scored between eight and ten, only thirteen websites out of more than 500 tested could be classed as error-free, a small rise on the ten we recorded last time. 

Our "world turned upside down" has BP, Rolls Royce and Diageo near the bottom of the table, all with scores of less than three out of a possible ten. There are some improvements, however, with Mothercare up ten places, BP up 11, small rises for Barclays and Domino Pizza, and similar small rises for Debenhams, Tate & Lyle, and Topps Tiles up 80, a company that also rose in our recent UK top 500 retail chart. 

Most large organisations use content management systems to control their web presence and there is now a bewildering choice of systems on the market.

Very often, the choice of a CMS rests with others in an organisation and in our experience  these systems can be fustrating and challenging, with not every end-user being totally happy with their choice.

Changing a CMS of course, can be a nightmare, and often vendors and web agencies are irrevocably tied in to companies unable to find the time and budget needed to make a major change. Often it's only when a website needs a total revamp that this happens.

Many large companies rely on pitches from agencies and CMS vendors when they are looking to change. Web managers are faced with a large number of competing claims from agencies and CMS vendors, each promising their solution is the best, but until now there has never been a way to find independent and consistent advice to help establish the best product for the job.

Now, building on the Industry standard benchmarking we have been offering across the FTSE, Local and Central Government, Retail, Life Sciences and many other sectors, we are planning a report ranking sites by their relevant Content Management Systems (CMS) and - where known -  their service providers / agencies.

If you manage a website in the public or private sector, and use a content management system, either run in-house or by an external agency, we'd like to hear which content management system and (if appropriate) which external agency works with you. In return , we'd be delighted to offer you a free summary of your own website's performance . You can post a response here, or if you'd rather keep it confidential, email to info@sitemorse.com.

Many thanks in advance.

At a time of general cost-cutting in government departments it would perhaps be overly optimistic to look for major improvements in departmental websites, but the Countryside Council for Wales's achievement in the latest Sitemorse Central Government Survey this time shows that it's quite possible to raise the game.

Their scores - and that of HSE - prove that any organisation can drastically improve websites with a small budget and a lot of effort.

The CCW takes a lot of pride in its websites and as well as taking the three top spots this time, they have another in the top ten, so it goes to show that making a website visit a good experience for users does not necessarily involve an enormous budget and lots of people at work.

We find that it's often small things that drag a website down and lead to a poor quality experience for its users. Fixing them need not be inordinately expensive and can be done quickly by a small team.

The full UK Central Government Qtr 3 2012 survey results are on our website - if you work for a government organisation you might care to check how your own website performed, more than 300 were benchmarked against criteria including quality, performance, function and accessibility.

You might expect Swiss Banks to be efficient, and when it comes to their websites, some score very highly on criteria such as code quality, accessibility and compliance, according to new research from Sitemorse. 

Our quarterly review of the websites of well over 200 banks in this sector found that more than 10 per cent were classed as 'error-free' by our methodology, a high score compared to other sectors such as retail or FTSE companies.

Despite accessibility of websites being very much still a hot item and backed by law within Europe, nearly 40 of the banking sites tested fail accessibility tests on every page. For the full testing results, see Swiss Banks Qtr 2 2012 on our website.

Two major furniture retailers, both selling sofas and all that go with them online. Both big and respected names. The website of the first one comes in the top three of the Sitemorse benchmark of UK retailers. The other is No 471, very bottom of the list.

The comparison spotlights the large divide in the retail sector between the most efficient websites - ones that work well with few or no errors and are accessible to all users - and ones which are riddled with errors and which have no pages that are accessible to disabled and semi-disabled web users. 

The full survey has now been published on the Sitemorse website - if you are interested in the retail sector, the results may surprise you. You may want to see the full survey data or read a summary.

Against a background of huge increases in tuition fees and a consequential drop in university applications, competition for the best students is hotting up.

And a crucial part of attracting them, given that most students today can't remember a world without the internet, is the university's own website.

So you'd think a lot more effort would be put in by universities and colleges into making their websites a good experience for users - but not according to the latest research from Sitemorse. Our Q2 universities benchmark of nearly 300 FE websites shows most of them - with some honourable exceptions - are still full of errors and not accessible for the disabled.

The Times Higher Educational Supplement recently published a poll of 150,000 international students that found only four per cent of students used social media to select a university and only six per cent were persuaded by staff at university fairs. No less than 45 per cent of students said recommendations by friends were the most important factor and 41 per cent cited the institution's website.

Our benchmark of almost 300 websites of universities and colleges has now been published. The results may surprise you. Check out the summary or full results data on the Sitemorse website.

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.

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.