Top of the league and best site overall was Skipton Building Society with Birmingham Midshires in second place. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was AIB which was also the worse site overall in September’s report as well.

- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor html] was Co-operative Bank. AIB had the highest number of warnings with more than 56,000.

- 16 sites tested failed basic metadata test for their front page.

- Site with fastest overall server response time was Birmingham Midshires, with an average page response time of 0.012 seconds. The site with the slowest response time was Abbey, where average page response was over 22 seconds per page.

- Site with the fastest download speed was Northern Rock.

- The site that contained the most errors was Coventry Building Society; no sites were error free this time. The site we found the lowest number of errors was the Bradford and Bingley.

Accessibility testing
+ 9 of the sites achieved a greater than 90% compliance

+ 5 sites scored between 50% and 90% compliance for the pages tested

+ 16 sites scored less than 50%, with 9 of the 16 sites achieving less than 5% compliance

+ Every page tested on HBOS plc, Portman and Britannia failed to meet the mandatory requirements.

The tests completed address a number of the requirements for the mandatory priorities 1 only.

The results of the accessibility testing currently do not affect the overall ratings or rankings for the league tables contained in this report. The range of tests [Web Accessibility Initiative WAI] that can be completed automatically are limited, 100% compliance with the automated tests does not mean 100% compliance to the requirements.

The findings take into account the website 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 many thousands of website tests of commercial, institutional and other websites conducted over the last year.

Tests were confined to the top 250 pages of the websites and were completed during the last week of November 2003 - a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 15th January 2004.