Our latest Index benchmark of the top 500 UK retail websites makes particularly interesting reading, with a whole bunch of lesser known names making an impact at the top end of our table.

One clothing discount store making big improvements to its site score estimates that 34 million people visit its site each year.

You don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out how many users go to the big, well-known high street names online, but sadly many of these companies score very poorly.

The latest UK Retail Index is now online, so feel free to see how your favourite stores perform online - we rate their websites against key criteria including functionality, code quality, performance and accessibility.

It's vital  that users get the best quality experience when they go to a site - there are always plenty of competitors around waiting to pick up sales .Offering the lowest prices may be a big draw, but if users encounter errors and problems, they will go elsewhere in seconds. 

So it's not difficult to see that stores that fix errors and make their websites easier to navigate will see improvements in the 'bottom line' as well as online.

Sitemorse has been carrying out quarterly benchmarks of the banking sector in Switzerland for the last three years, and our latest Index benchmark looks at more than 200 to measure how well their websites work .

Although the bank we marked top this time has only been around for eight years old, the second-rated bank is 200 years old and based in a Swiss canton between Lakes Zurich, Lucerne and the Alps. With full marks for function - meaning the site has very few missing links and errors that can often give web users problems - the Sparkasse Schwyz site also scores highly on accessibility, performance and code quality. 

With many people banking online and using the internet for research comparing accounts, it's vital that any bank's website work as efficiently as possible and gives the very best customer experience. This is particularly the case where clients are probably based many miles away from their banks, and an atmosphere of total trust is necessary.

Our Q2 Swiss Banks Index can now be seen on  the Sitemorse website.

Our quarterly Retail Top 500 Index isn't published for a few more days, but one story has already hit the headlines in the online retail media.

Little known Yorkshire-based family-owned pharmacy chain HI Weldrick dramatically shot up our table of the best performing websites in Q2 with a climb of no less than 423 places.

The pharmacy climbed to eighth spot, marking a dramatic change in its fortunes this year.

Its score of 7.10 out of a possible ten marks leaves it close to a top 5 spot where another relative minnow, Greenhalghs Craft Bakery holds fifth place with a score only marginally more at 7.36. This is still some way behind the new leader this quarter as DFS regains the top spot with a score of 9.52.

More information can be seen on the Retail Bulletin website, which previews the Index.

Full details of the Index, which has some dramatic falls for some well known high street names as well as success stories, will be published on the Sitemorse website on 23rd May. If you work in the retail trade then don't miss it.

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.

Do the official numbers for the UK's growth fail to capture recent very high levels of growth in the digital economy? That's the question being asked following a recent report that says Britain may be the biggest e-commerce market in the world.

Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph, thinks reports of double and triple-dip recession ignore much digital data, and quotes some reports which back up the theory.

If it's true, then every organisation with a website should once again look at the standard and quality of their web presence, perhaps using the regular Sitemorse Index benchmarks as a start-point.

All too often we find, while spotlighting good practice in web governance, that the majority of websites in any one sector, whether it be retail, FTSE or even universities and police forces, are far from excellent and the best-known organisations don't always have the best sites.

Warner's Telegraph piece, published over the Bank Holiday weekend, makes interesting reading and suggests by 2015 the digital economy may account for a tenth of the UK total, making it bigger than construction, transport and the utilities.

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.

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.

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?