Top of the league and best site overall was the Cooperative Bank [came 2nd last time], with the Allied Irish Bank bottom of the Major Banks and Building Societies for the second report running, the Coventry Building Society again ranked as the worse building society site of those tested. The British Bankers Association came last overall, as it did last time.

New in this report, we also provide the details of the server operating system, allowing readers to make their own comparisons.

* The site with lowest errors [with only 1] was the Bradford & Bingley, of the commercial sites Coventry Building Society had the highest error count, overall most errors to be found were on the British Bankers' Association's website

* Nearly half the sites tested [14] failed basic meta data test for their front page [up very slightly from last test] potentially causing sites unnecessary problems.

* Only 9 of the sites tested passed all basic speed tests, looking at first page download, simulated as being viewed by a home [56k], ADSL [512k] and user with corporate access [1mb].

* Largest site overall was Abbey National, with over 7,500 pages, the smallest site tested was that of the Woolwich.

* Site with the lowest number of warnings was HFC bank with a total of 279; Allied Irish Bank had the highest number of warnings, with over 600,000 [warnings being lack of compliance with HTML standards].

* Site with fastest overall server response was Britannia Building Society, where average page response was 0.011 seconds. The site with the slowest response time was LloydsTSB where average page response was some 10 seconds per page.

* Site with highest download speed was Bank of England site, and Barclay's had the slowest download speed of sites tested.