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. 

Sitemorse never stands still, and we're currently in the process of offering a number of layered services to meet the differing budget and organisational requirements of our clients. 

We have already introduced the enterprise-level version of our software, known as "Governisation" to our clients who have large web presences, often in several different countries.

Next is a change to the Sitemorse service many clients use, designed to report back on the quality, compliance, performance, availability and compatibility of a client web estate. From now on, this service will be known as the 'Web Manager's Toolkit'.

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

The Web Manager's Toolkit is designed to do what it 'says on the tin' - help those who have the job of managing websites ensure their organisations can have total confidence in their web presence. It will utilise the powerful Sitemorse SaaS "engine" platform.

In response to client requests we are also introducing the option of a 3 year contract for services, fixing the service fee 'as of today' with payment being made annually during the period of the contract. This will reduce administration time and costs for all, as well as allowing for simpler budgeting.

Just as with the Governisation product, the Web Manager's Toolkit will have its own website shortly to provide an introduction to the new service, and detail how it works to help clients.

After months of warnings, this week the FBI cut off the unusual safety net that allowed as many as 4 million virus-infected computers to continue to safely access the Internet. 

But for various reasons the "Internet Doomsday" that so many predicted seems to have been averted.

Last year, the FBI uncovered and disabled computer malware that was unscrupulously leading millions of Internet users worldwide to fraudulent websites. After discovering the malware, called DNSChanger, the agency took over the servers, which the agency says were probably operated by Russian criminals. The FBI-run servers allowed infected computers to continue accessing the Internet normally-but on Monday, in a scheduled shutdown, those servers, which were costly to operate, were taken offline.

Following on from the computer "glitches" that removed so seriously affected the RBS, Natwest and Barclays websites over the last days and weeks, this malware on a grand scale points up the risks major companies as well as private individuals face in maintaining a web presence these days.

"Phishing" - attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity - and "malware" - malicious software including viruses, trojans and 'worms' - are becoming much more prevalent on the web. 

Since links to malware or 'phishing' sites can easily creep into any organisation's web presence, the importance of external monitoring for web managers has grown. Newspapers and online media are full of salutary tales around organisations which have had their web operations affected in this way. 

Follow Sitemorse on LinkedIn and Twitter for best practice and comment around web governance.

Barclays website has now had problems on the day its Chairman appeared before a high-profile committee of MPs. RBS and Natwest are still apologising for the "glitch" which saw many clients unable to move money in and out of accounts.

The causes of these unprecedented incidents are not clear, yet they serve to show how important having a smooth-running operational web presence is now to large corporations. Whereas once the web was a second-class citizen in terms of its communications value, absence of normal service makes news.

Governisation from Sitemorse - a blend of 'governance' and 'optimisation' - is a bespoke service developed for large organisations to help manage brand, reputation and compliance online, for both the vital management of your sites and an unrivalled level of web confidence for your organisation. 

Our new Governisation website answers the questions why would you need web governance and what could it do for you. If your work involves managing risk or compliance for a large organisation then you should take a serious look at it.

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.