Sitemorse subscription clients will soon be getting an upgrade that will mean all their web pages will be checked every week - and each link will be checked against known phishing and malware sites.

We are also working on an 'iPhone app', delivering weekly notifications that identify the key links that need to be looked at - be it those links that are not working or those that are linking out to phishing / malware sites.

Read more about this new free service or email us for details - sales@Sitemorse.com.

An interesting view of the Sitemorse survey of the top global 500 retailers comes from Retail Blogger, Bill Brown.

 "Many of the poor performers were online-only retailers ... It's surprising that such retailers don't pay more attention to their website effectiveness. After all, their website is all they've got: they have no physical shops from which to trade.
"I see this as the equivalent of a physical retail shop trying to trade with its front door locked. Just imagine, you're standing behind the counter waiting for your customers to flood in, but they can't. What an absurd situation."

Bill takes our point "it's not about money being thrown at a problem. It's more about getting the basics right, and many smaller retailers are doing just that, and delivering the goods to their online customers.

What this report is saying is that by spending relatively modest amounts on your website you can achieve real effectiveness in your e-commerce operations."

His blog has also received a really telling response from one of the large retailers mentioned. " ..We are aware of certain shortcomings within our sites at present which will be remedied when we launch our new websites in 2012. " This is an excuse we have heard so often over the years. Why on earth, if they are aware of problems, wait until next year to put them right?

It's important that your website works properly - but how can you know that it's functioning correctly all the time? Basic site functionality is not glamorous, but it is a 'must-have', just like housekeeping.

Ten years ago it was quite normal to have major websites that didn't work properly, often with missing images and data, and broken links. Different rules were applied to web communications than those of the "Real World" where documents had to be proofread and pored over by lawyers before being released.

Without help from some kind of automatic auditing, controlling the web presence of a large organisation these days is extraordinarily difficult and perhaps impossible.

Thankfully, the tools we use to monitor websites have changed, vastly for the better. Testing that might have taken hours or days for a web team to undertake a few years ago can now be done in a very short time. Sitemorse, for example, allows web managers and editors to keep constant track of all-important parameters. It's no longer just about fixing bad links. Full details can be seen on our news pages.

Before you move on, think carefully - is your website working properly, all of it? Because if not you can be sure that someone outside your organisation will be the first to find it.

When things go wrong they always go wrong at the worst possible time.  A rather glum view but somehow it always works out to be true.  And it's certainly true for people responsible for controlling their organisations websites.

So last week would be a bad time for a link on the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport (www.culture.gov.uk) with a title of process of a General Election (which links to a page on the www.parliament.uk website) to go wrong.  And if that link was on the Home page it would probably be noticed and fixed pretty quick, right ?  Well, actually this link first failed at around 1pm on Friday 7^th May - yes that's right, just around the time when everyone would be looking for any info they could find about elections and hung Parliaments.  It was eventually fixed a little over four and a half hours later.

There's a couple of things that are a little alarming about this.

From a culture.gov.uk view point, this link wasn't buried in the depths of their website - it was right there on the front page.  Now most sites use some sort of monitoring service to measure availability and performance of their sites and it would be strange if they didn't use their Home page for this like most organisations do.  To mitigate this a little, the problem with many of these services is that they only measure availability and performance and they don't check the quality of the page the site serves up. So you can end up serving up rubbish with 100% availability with superb performance when what is actually needed is something a little more sophisticated which checks that the page is OK as well.

Now, looking at this from the www.parliament.uk site, I'd say that a page covering how elections are run would be a pretty key page on their site.  And if someone decided to move or rename such a page then you'd expect them to put what's called a "redirect" in place so that if anyone has a link to the original page any clicks on those links will automatically be redirected to the new page.  This is normal practice and happens all the time.  And indeed that's exactly what they did four and a half hours after making the change to solve the problem.

The people at culture.gov.uk probably blissfully unaware that the problem existed because they didn't solve the problem - the people at www.parliament.uk did.

The truth is that at end of the day, or in this case late afternoon, neither set of people come out well in this.

And, of course, the problem occurred at one of the most inconvenient of times possible.

My blog postings over the last couple of days talking about who needs to take responsibility for the quality of an organisations website seems to have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest.  Sadly it wasn't the reaction I was aiming for but it does reinforce my message that the only people really looking out for the customer is the CUSTOMER,

Our CEO, Lawrence Shaw, emailed the Chairman of Sitecore directly (after being hit with rather a terse response previously in trying to advise them of matters).  In his email he linked to the blog article about Toshiba's Business Communications Division  http://blog.sitemorse.com/2010/02/who-ends-up-in-court---you-or.html, who are a Sitecore reference site, pointing out why our companies should work together.

We haven't had any joy in engaging with them in the past and although we were expecting anything in the range of "yes, let's meet" to "no thanks".  We did not expect the response we did get.

Here are the two emails firstly from Lawrence and then the response.

Lawrence Shaw at Sitemorse [mailto:lshaw@Sitemorse.com]
Sent: 04 February 2010 09:47

Subject: Not the best reference site article Dear Mr Sondergaard,

I've just noticed this on our blog (below), is was posted after something was bought to our attention that we don't think is either correct, or factual -  your sales team claiming that your CMS wouldn't allow broken links etc & external checking services are of no value.

One of our marketing team has now checked your key clients, and we may end up with with some very unhappy people (internally and at the clients) if they have been given a false sense of security, the findings may not be what they want - its also not about shooting the messenger.

We did meet at Internet World a couple of years ago, I did look to follow-up with yourself but your staff were very dismissive of the need for external testing / verification tools.

Yours sincerely,


Lawrence Shaw
C E O

http://blog.sitemorse.com/2010/02/who-ends-up-in-court---you-or.html

And the reply

We have noticed your unauthorized usage of our brand, logo, protected name and trademarks.
The usage not unauthorized by Sitecore and you are instructed to immediate stop using our brand, logo, protected name and trademarks in the marketing of your company.
 
We have asked our lawyers to prepare a lawsuit against you for your slanderous behaviour as well as for your unauthorized usage of our protected intellectual property.
 
Also we noted that thus you have no permission to use Toshiba's brand and intellectual property in the marketing of your boutique you are using this in the public room.
We have advised our customer Toshiba and involved web design agency to both seek legal advice and possible take legal action against you immediately with no further warnings.
 
Best regards

Laust Sondergaard
Chairman

So, no mention of the fact that the customer has a problem.   No mention about how we might help the customer solve the problem.  No "thanks, we'll get straight on to it".

And what is slanderous about pointing out that two very important links on Toshiba's Home Page categorically don't work ? And the use of their trade name comes about because they have a "Powered by Sitecore" at the bottom of the Toshiba webpage (which I didn't notice when I grabbed the screen).

We also spoke to Toshiba again yesterday and though they were angry about the problems existing in the first place they were NOT annoyed with Sitemorse for finding them.

When I checked again this morning the problems have been solved.

It seems to me that this reinforces the message that YOU need to take control and responsibility for ensuring the quality of your Website, you can not rely on the assurances from others.

It's all about who's ACTUALLY responsible for what goes on with YOUR website.  Marketing blurb and SLAs are all very well but how do you actually measure whether your Design Agency actually delivered the error free, accessible and standards compliant website they said they would ?  Or that your new CMS system delivers on the same promise.

And if they don't come up to scratch what are the legal implications for them ?  Well very limited as these things are so difficult to prove - look at he long running (i.e. years and years) between companies and some of the big consultancies regarding failed projects.

But what about if your Home Page has failing links to content that are a legal requirement.  Who ends up in court then ?  Not them.  YOU.

If we take a look at a page we've mentioned before, the Toshiba Telecoms Home Page, we find 2 broken links. But not just any old broken links. The "Terms and Conditions" and the "Privacy Policy" links don't work, which are a bit more of a problem than the normal run-of-the-mill links as these are both legal requirements.

It's no defence to say "but my CMS vendor said this couldn't happen" or "but my Design Agency assured me that the site was perfect".  It wont wash.  At best it's a plea for leniency.

And if it's reported widely in the press - your reputation is in tatters and your brand is damaged.  Who'll bother to use your site when there are plenty of others to choose from ?

How about the internal Web Team ?  Is anyone telling the CIO/CEO that everything is fine with the site and that they are compliant with all the legal requirements placed on organisations with a website ? I suspect they are because I'm sure no one is saying "we're fine apart from these 2 crucial links on our Home Page".

It's time to raise the game and take quality a lot more seriously.  Take responsibility and take control.  Remember the visitors to your website didn't read the marketing blurb or hear the assurances your Design Agency gave you and there is ALWAYS an alternative for them to use.

Oh and it's worth pointing out that the links have been broken since at least the middle of October 2009 when we first spotted them. (that's over THREE months ago)

Take a look at the full size view

Not even a nice friendly Toshiba branded error page apologising for the inconvenience.

Who told the Hiscox CIO that their website was OK ?

This is a theme we touch on a lot in our conversations with customers, the press and in our blog.  There are things we find through our testing that are clearly unacceptable yet they exist on the websites of organisations and they are there each time we test the sites, not just an unlucky one-off.

So in Hiscox's case we find that their Accessibility Webpage on which they say they are going to work with the Shaw Trust to get their site to meet AA compliance.  That's a good thing to be doing it's just that on this page the main navigation buttons across the top of the page are images and 3 of the 5 don't have AltTxt defined so even on their Accessibility page they fail the most basic of the Accessibility guidelines.  I just can't imagine that anyone with responsibility for the Hiscox website would find these sorts of failings acceptable.  Working with specialist Accessibility organisations like The Shaw Trust is not about solving such simple problems.  That would be a shameful waste of money and the specialist skills of the Shaw Trust consultants.

So why does this situation arise ?  Is this 'accessibility' page simply paying lip service to a legal requirement, are the company kidding themselves or are they being told lies by those testing the site ?  When discussions with the in-house web team or the external design agency take place are either of these groups explaining the exact state of the quality of the website ?  (And, yes, let's broaden it out beyond just accessibility now as we find in our surveys that sites that score low on one category, say Accessibility, of our tests often also score low under our Function and Code Quality categories as well.)

I would doubt that any real, tangible information is disclosed and in its place are mere platitudes and generalities that are intended to placate those asking the questions (assuming that the questions are asked, of course)

So in place of relying on this I'd suggest that regular reports that independently assess and report on the quality of an organisations web estate is the only viable way for those responsible to really know what's going on.

The image below shows the Sitemorse Instant Snapshot view of the page showing Accessibility issues by drawing blue boxes around the problems.  The hover box tells you that there's a missing AltTxt  (which is true of the 3 middle tabs.  And the black arrow shows where they say they will always have AltTxt)  The other blue boxes mostly relate to the use of Deprecated code.

View  full size image

We're not targeting Hiscox in any malicious way, it's just the irony of having such blatant Accessibility issues on their Accessibility page.  If we take a look at a page we've mentioned before, the Toshiba Telecoms Home Page, we find 2 broken links.  But not just any old broken links.  The "Terms and Conditions" and the "Privacy Policy" links don't work, which is a bit more of a problem than the normal run-of-the-mill links as these are both legal requirements.

Again is anyone telling the CIO/CEO that everything is fine with the site and that they are compliant with all the legal requirements placed on organisations with a website ?  I suspect they are because I'm sure no one is saying "we're fine apart from these 2 crucial links on our Home Page".

Oh and it's worth pointing out that they've been broken since at least the middle of October 2009 when we spotted them. (that's over THREE months ago)

Take a look at the full size view

People comment about the fact that we check (and probably more importantly score) external links on the websites we audit.  So I thought a blog posting on our thoughts behind why we do this would be helpful.

When we "look" at a web page during an Audit, we run all of our checks on the page. We then check all of the links on the page.  If it's an external link we simply download the Base Page of the linked page and do two things - a) check that the link is working and b) check the performance.  We do this because these are links from your pages that people may click on and we consider that any link on one of your pages, whether it is an internal link to another page on your site or to one of your partner sites, is important - otherwise why link to it ?  It's also based on the premise that if people click on a link on one of your pages they are not necessarily going to go into any deep thought process about who's responsibility it is if that link fails or is horribly slow.  It's on your page and therefore it's YOUR fault.  Once they get onto another site's page it's much more obvious that it's someone else's site and any subsequent problems are theirs not yours.  Which is why we don't fully audit external pages but simply check the link to it and it's performance.

A typical view is "I can understand flagging external response errors such as 404s because we have a control over that - we either link or not".  Then surely this is equally true of a page who's performance is consistently awful - link or don't ? Like everything in Sitemorse we are attempting to report things that are useful to you.  A report that tells you what the 10 slowest items on your site are is undoubtedly a useful piece of information that you can decide whether or not to act upon.   (It isn't a subjective measure from our point of view, we're simply taking the 10 slowest items whilst making no judgement on them as to how slow they are.  They are just slower than everything else we tested during the audit.)  And whether it's an internal or external page, it's just the remedy that's different.  If it's a really important link that's always slow then there's not much to be done but it doesn't mean you shouldn't be made aware of it. 

Let's not confuse the scoring that we do with the value of the information that we provide.  We appreciate that people are focussed on how well they do in the Surveys and whether their scores are improving.  But let me put this in perspective,  When we are calculating the average response times and average download speeds from which we calculate the performance score we take the timings from every single GET request we issue as we traverse the site.  Let's say we issue an average of 10 GET requests per page and we audit 250 pages.  That's 2,500 GET requests.  One external link that is a bit slow won't shift the average speed figures by any significant amount and will have NO impact on the performance score for that audit run.  e.g. If the average response time across the 2,500 requests was 0.5 seconds it would need almost 10% (that's 250) of them to change to 1.5 seconds in order to change the average to .6 seconds.  So one, two or ten slow external links will make no difference to the score.

Another Blog posting on external links called "Broken links are broken links" is here http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/broken-links-are-broken-links.html

This is one objection that our sales people get quite a lot.  Often because people in this position are starting to look at how they'll test the new site before launching and enquire about our services.

Website managers often hold the view that until the new site is heavily populated with content that it isn't worth spending time testing as there's nothing to test.  So, yes, they are interested in Sitemorse but "not just yet". 

However, lets look at the rationale behind the presumption that taking Sitemorse when you've just embarked on a major redesign of your site is a waste of time.

Will ABSOLUTELY NONE of the content from the old site move to the new site ?

Unlikely.  So you can be testing the current content right now to make sure it's OK.  That way you don't taint the new site with old errors.

PDFs are a great case in point.  I would suspect that most of your PDFs will move to the new site.  Make sure that they are all accessible and that any links and mailto: links work.

How about Templates and Style sheets ?

They may change but who wrote the old ones and who is writing the new ones ?

If it's the same people or the old ones are being updated rather than scrapped you could bring poor quality practices into the new site from the old.  Test them now and clean them up.  That way your developers will familiarise themselves with best practice BEFORE coding the new site.  It's often easier to learn by your (or others') mistakes than to learn from a text book.

What about external links and feeds ?

It's pretty likely that you'll retain a high proportion of your existing links and feeds.  Do you know how well they all work right now ?  How many links fail on your site currently ?  How many have permanent redirects set up ?  How may mailto: links go to non-existent email addresses ?  Now is a good time to find out before you port them to the new site.  Sitemorse will also test the first page of a linked site, running all of its test on that page.  If it fails miserably you might choose not to link to it anymore as it would taint your new site's image.

How accessible is your current site ?

If you find out what you didn't do too well on the old site you can make sure you don't repeat the same mistakes on the new site. 

Hindsight is OK but foresight is much better.

And is your code standards compliant.

As this is the section that most organisations get their lowest score it's reasonable to assume that the most likely case is that it isn't.  Internet Explorer has been very tolerant of non-compliant code (see my blog posts http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/firefox-3-hits-8-million-downl.html and http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/ie8-standards-compliance-issue.html) which has allowed coders to write code that they assume is fine because it seems to work OK.  My blog posts explore this topic in more detail but essentially that fact is becoming less true as Opera, Firefox, Safari and now IE8 become much less tolerant.  Check out what you do wrong in your old site now so you don't make the same errors in the new site. 

It's MUCH cheaper to engineer out errors while you're coding than to correct them later when you're testing or they fail on the Live site.

I believe the answer to the question of when should you start testing your new site is BEFORE you even start to develop it. 

We have seen many new site launches spoiled by poor content transferred from the old site.