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.

The websites of most major pharmaceutical companies are not rated highly in a new benchmark of the Global Life Sciences sector from Sitemorse.

Out of a total of 225 global pharmaceutical companies surveyed, the websites of Pfizer, Wyeth, Merck, Baxter, Solvay and Bristol-Myers Squibb all come in the bottom 20, while names you may never have heard of like Anergis, Lumavita AG, Max Zeller Sohne and Piramal Healthcare are rated very highly.

Full details of the survey will be released on December 21, but anyone who wants to know how their company's site performed can contact us for a no-charge summary.

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.

More than fifteen years after the internet began to be a mass-market experience there are no longer any excuses for links that don't work, or pages that do not have titles.

 Yet in a recent survey of the top 500 FTSE companies, Sitemorse still found well over two per cent of web pages that did not have a title, and well over 3 per cent failing basic functional tests.

 Since a company's website is the first port of call for virtually all users nowadays, missing images and poor links can give a poor initial impression. After all, if an organisation's  website is put together in a slapdash fashion, what does that say about the business itself? 

Google and other search engines may not properly catalogue or index a site that contains HTML errors, and that can mean less users finding what they are looking for - and in the case of e-commerce sites, perhaps a failure of sales and the consequential hit to the company's bottom line. 

Around a quarter of users, according to recent research, will duck out of an online sale because of technical issues. A massive 82% of consumers said that if a business' website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web - or even in- store.

Yet recent Sitemorse benchmarks show many online retailers either do not know, or choose to ignore this, with some of the best-known high street names performing very badly on quality issues.

Big is definitely not best when it comes to corporate websites - or at least that's what latest research from Sitemorse would suggest.

Most people would probably never have heard of the handful of mostly Swiss-based pharma names who make up our best and brightest in the latest Sitemorse Global Life Sciences Survey - but we'll bet everyone has heard of some of the pharmaceutical heavyweights that make up much of the bottom end of the table.Read our survey results to find out which companies are still failing basic accessibility tests, even though this is now a requirement backed by law.

So well done Cilag AG, Lumavita AG and Siegfried AG - three companies who take the time and trouble to ensure their error-free websites provide a good experience for their users.

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?

Access to the Sitemorse Surveys has changed over the years with different levels of access to different people.

A while ago we changed the Public view of the Surveys to be a simple alphabetic listing so that people could easily find themselves in the list, with our coloured blobs showing how well or how poorly the site had performed.  Customers, as always, retained access to the ranked listings so they could see where they were and whether they'd moved up or down the survey rankings.

However, we've found that our Customers not only wanted to see for themselves how they were ranked but were also very keen that everyone else could see how well they were doing in the survey rankings.  So we've decided to change the Public access view of the surveys to show the rankings but to also allow them to sort the list alphabetically so they can find entries easily. (simply click on the column headings)

Hopefully this will satisfy everybody's needs.

There's always lots of bad press about pretty much anything we do as a nation compared to everybody else.  So despite having had a far better economic record than the rest of Europe for over a decade we're suddenly being portrayed as the "sick man of Europe" again.  We're hopeless at sport even though our guy got knocked out by the eventual winner at Wimbledon (OK so he didn't play well but Nadal has been awesome).  Our industries are less efficient than other countries but we've got higher employment levels even without trade barriers that others use.  So where's this leading ?

Sitemorse run surveys against various industry sectors.  We run one of our reports against each site in the survey table, score each site and then rank them.  We run these surveys against a few sectors in the USA so I thought it would be interesting to see how the UK sites stacked up against their US counterparts.

FTSE 100 Vs. Fortune 100

Website Survey June 2008 - FTSE 100

Website Survey June 2008 - Fortune 100

96.1% pages passed functional tests

11.0% pages passed code standards

45.6% pages passed accessibility (level A)

0.92% pages passed accessibility (level AA)

So, ever-so slightly better on the Function tests, substantially better at writing standards compliant code and streets ahead in terms of Accessibility.

UK Central Gov. Vs. US Federal Gov.

Website Survey June 2008 - UK Central Government

Website Survey June 2008 - US Gov Federal Agencies

And lo and behold we have a very similar situation, with the same strengths and weaknesses appearing.

UK Local Gov. Vs. US State Gov.

Website Survey June 2008 - UK Local Government

Website Survey June 2008 - US Gov State and Territorial Government Websites

Coding standards are clearly not a top priority for any of the US sectors. This may come home to bite them in the pants with new versions of browsers, especially IE 8. (see my blog posting on this http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/firefox-3-hits-8-million-downl.html)  And, even though we have slightly different Accessibility standards and legislation the US results are disappointing.

So this is an island of good news in a sea of doom and gloom from the mainstream press.  I bet this doesn't hit the headlines of either the Red Tops or the Broadsheets.  If I want to get some press coverage for the Sitemorse Surveys I need to find some bad figures.  Perhaps the UK retail sector might get some coverage

Website Survey July 2008 - Retail