Top of the league and best site overall was Co-operative Bank with Bank of England in second place. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was AIB which was also the worse site overall for the last 3 reports.

- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor html] was Co-operative Bank. AIB again had the highest number of warnings with more than 62,500 – an increase from last months 56,000

- 2 sites had 0 errors, LloydsTSB and Bradford and Bingley

- 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 0.01 seconds. The site with the slowest response time was Abbey, where average page response was over 21 seconds per page.

- Site with the fastest download speed was the Bank of England, slowest was AIB not helped by the number of warnings, poor HTML

- The site that contained the most errors again was the Coventry Building Society, with over 10 times more than any other site.

Accessibility testing
- Top site this month was Royal Bank Scotland
- 9 of the sites achieved a greater than 90% compliance
- 5 sites scored between 50% and 90% compliance for the pages tested – the same as last time
- 16 sites scored less than 50%, with 11 of the 16 sites achieving less than 5% compliance
- 2 sites had no pages compliant.

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 week of 19th December 2003 - a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 15th Feburay 2004.