Government websites - Nov '03 report and ranking.

28 Nov 2003

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Top of the league and best site overall was Local e-Government the site in second place Equal Opportunities Commission. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was UK Online for Business, this was also the worse site overall in September’s report as well. As an example problem from the worst site, the first lines from the page say;

Government Policies
The UK Government is committed to developing the UK as the best place in the world for E-commerce……

The page link ‘e-Communications’ comes up with an error, a screen shot is included on page 12 of the report.

For a FREE copy of the full report please email us.

In testing the sites for compliance with the government standards for meta data and eGMS (electronic government meta data standard) only 5 sites had any of the mandatory data, the best score was just under 5.88% compliant - every other site failed on every single page.

Only 4 of the sites tested passed the automated tests for compliance with the requirements of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, the other 58 sites failed to meet very basic Priority 1 requirements.

Sol Saad – Director for Business2www commented
‘considering the expense, complexity and importance of these sites, and when compared with their advertising budget for promoting them (recently quoted at over £6m), the cost for comprehensive and thorough website testing for central government sites is rather insignificant. One would have thought that government officials would ensure that their sites worked properly and to the highest standards.

We have developed specific testing services for government websites using the government's own compliance standards, and were rather surprised to find that virtually every page we tested on central government sites failed their own benchmarks and standards.’

- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor html] was Invest to Save Budget. UK Sport had the highest number of warnings with nearly 50,000

- 33 sites tested failed basic meta data test for their front page

- Site with fastest overall server response was Public Record Office, where average page response was 0.015 seconds. The site with the slowest response time again was UK Online for Business where average page response was over 15 seconds per page.

- Site with highest download speed was e-Envoy, and UK Online for Business had the slowest download speed of sites tested.

- Overall the number of errors have been reduced since the last report, sites showing improvement include; Inland Revenue, UK Online and Office of the e-Envoy.

The findings take into account the site size; e.g. a website with 10 pages and 1 error would score the same as a website with 100 pages and 10 errors – both having page/error ratio of 10:1 The Ratings are based on over 10,000 tests of commercial, institutional and other websites conducted over the last year.

Tests were of the top 250 pages of the sites and were completed during the second week of November ’03, and a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 15th January 2004.

The cost of our service for the average government site is £250 per month [for sites of up to 25,000 pages]; small sites of 400 pages £55 per month. If you would like further information, please use the form at the end of the report.