Top of the league and best site overall was Local e-Government [consistently a top site] the site in second place CSA. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was UK Sport.

eGMS
In testing the sites for compliance with the government standards for meta data and eGMS (electronic government meta data standard) only 10 sites had any of the mandatory data, all but 2 sites having less than 10% of the site pages compliant - every other site failed on every single page.

Accessibility
Only 7 [improvement from previous report] of the sites tested passed automated tests for compliance with the requirements of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, 14 of the sites failed on virtually all pages [around 90%+]. 3 sites failed on every page.

NOTE - Accessibility compliance is not currently factored into the overall rankings

Key Findings
- Site with the lowest number of errors was Local e-Government again. Consumer.gov.uk had the highest number of errors with over 550.

- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor html] was Invest to Save Budget [isb.gov.uk] again. UK Sport had the highest number of warnings with over 180,000 – last time it had the highest with some 50,000

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

- Site with fastest overall server response was the MOD, where average page response was 0.068 seconds. The site with the slowest response time again was UK Online for Business [3rd report running] where average page response was over 9 seconds per page.

- Site with highest download speed was again the e-Envoy site, and UK Sport had the slowest download speed of sites tested.

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 many thousands of 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 last week of January ’04, and a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 5th March 2004.