BUSINESS2WWW’s League Table of FTSE 100 CORPORATE WEBSITES

This January Business2www has repeated our unique survey of the FTSE Top 100 Corporate Websites, first conducted in November 2001.

The B2W FTSE 100 League Table ranks Britain’s top corporate sites in order of ‘best and worst performance’ against the key measures of site errors and warnings reported, site load speeds and server response times.

In this second League Table we checked and analysed 70,000 pages (totalling nearly 5 million individual checks) within 48 hours.

This more intensive checking has significantly increased the number of errors discovered, with the average number of errors per site increasing from 14 in November to 43 in January.

The effects of this more intensive test were varied. GKN (no longer in the FTSE 100) came first, with Electrocomponents a close second and winning poll position in the FTSE 100 itself. Reed-Elsevier slipped from 1st to 17th, whilst Tesco fell from 7th place to 102nd. Many sites scarcely changed their League position at all, whilst others rose or fell dramatically - confirming the requirement for continuous monitoring of your site.

We intend to repeat this League Table monthly throughout 2002.

A lot of money is invested in and expected from Websites, and yet 97% of the many hundreds we’ve now tested have errors and problems which impair performance, frustrate investors and customers, and at worst compromise the company’s reputation.

Our unique automated software enables us to ensure that any site – regardless of specification, purpose, size or complexity – can be checked regularly and objectively to make sure that it is working properly, and that the company – its management and shareholders – have got what they have paid for.