Top of the league and best site overall was Local e-Government. The major Government website promoting ebusiness ‘UK Online for Business’ goes from second from bottom previously, to the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall, the title of the website proclaiming [taken from the site 8th Sept ‘03].

'The gateway for UK online for business... helping you succeed in online business'

- UK Online for Business website fails all tests carried out; download speed, errors, warnings and very basic Metadata.

- The top site had overall rating was 6.5, the worse site overall rating was 0.6

- No websites were error free. In terms of overall error rating, Central Government websites have the most problems – the majority of the problems indicate poorly managed and maintained sites.

- There were 16 sites that had over 1,000 errors; the site with the most errors being Inland Revenue, having over 10,000. Second highest error count was HM Treasury

- Only 26 of the 58 sites passed basic meta data test for their front page, this going against the government standard ‘EGMS’, this is only testing 3 fields of the first viewed page – a full EGMS test will be completed for the next report.

- 46 of the 58 sites tested failed 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], with only 12 passing all tests.

- The government site with the lowest number of warnings [warnings being problems with html code for the site] was – E venturing; Gov. News Network had the highest number of warnings, UK Online had the second highest count.

- The site with fastest overall server response was the Child Support Agency, where page response average was 0.137 seconds. The site with the slowest response time was UK online for business where average page response was over 22 seconds per page.

- Site with highest download speed was E-envoy, and Gov. News Network had the slowest download speed of sites tested [this may be directly related to the very poor html on the site].