Business2www (B2W) ran tests of Business Link Websites between the 23rd and 29th of January 2003. In a few days B2W – using the unique Sitemorse™ automated testing, monitoring and reporting software conducted checked every possible page combination of some 50,000 Website pages. The average Business Link Website has 1,216 pages, but this masks a very wide variation in Website size – from below 50 to nearly 10,000.

None of the Business Link sites are error free. Number of errors ranged from 2 [Business Link Surrey] to 120,000 [Business Link Lincolnshire & Rutland] making it the website with the most errors we have reviewed to date.

Top of the table came Business Link Surrey with Business Link Tyne & Wear coming last. Commendably, two websites – Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire - had only 2 Errors, and seven had fewer than 10.

As a resource, the websites seem to have a great deal of very valuable content for the business user – managing such complex or changing sites must present the site owners with many challenges, this further compounded with the problems caused by the many different browsers, operating systems, hardware and software platforms the site needs to be compatible with. Manual or internal thorough testing of such sites can no longer be practical or possible.

Sitemorse™ it is unique in that it is the only product that test every combination of every page and option of a website, acting as any visitor to your site would. It then identifies problems, by type / page / line etc allowing very rapid correction.

Sites Excluded from the test.

- Northumberland Business Link currently redesigning web site.
- County Durham Business Link, only a single page listed via a general use commercial domain name.
- Cheshire and Warrington Business Link, there seems no access unless you register. The only site that prevents any access to its content. Even basic contact information has controlled access.

The average MorseMark Rating was 3.5 ex 10, a rather poor performance compared with both central government sites and especially the major corporate websites in the FTSE 100 where the average rating is nearly 6.0 ex 10.

Given the importance applied to Site Errors, these were the primary cause of the relatively poor average performance of Business Link websites. These are slower in terms of both Server Response Time and Download Speed than the average Corporate Site.

12 websites were found to have over 200 errors, 100 times more then Derbyshire.

As part of the Sitemorse™ test all Business Link websites were checked to see how well the first three 'metatags' on the home page are being coded – i.e. existed on 23-29 January 2003. If not, it registered a failure. The test showed that only 17 sites (41% of those tested) passed this test, whilst 24 failed. It did not test the quality of the metadata entered.

Over half of the Business Links are failing the E-Government Metadata Standard (EGMS). This should be a cause of concern for those Business Links, especially as it takes little time to put right.