Top site was the CSA in second place was the Dept. of Health. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was Local Government Association [LGA].

eGMS

In testing the sites for compliance with the government standards for meta data, eGMS (electronic government meta data standard) only 4 sites had any of the mandatory, The Pension Service having over 95% of pages correct, next best was DWP / FCO with just 1.2%, 1 site scored 0.63% - ALL OTHER SITES FAILED ON EVERY PAGE.

Accessibility

11 [improvement from previous report] of the sites tested passed tests for compliance with the requirements of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, 12 of the sites failed on virtually or all pages. 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 CSA with 0 again. Consumer.gov.uk again had the highest number of errors with over 555.

- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor and not compliant html] was Invest to Save Budget [isb.gov.uk] again. Worktrain had the highest number of warnings with nearly 30,000.

- 31 sites tested passed basic meta data test for their front page.

- Site with fastest overall server response was Health and Safety Executive, where average page response time was 0.014 seconds. The site with the slowest response time was; Office of the Rail Regulators where average page response was over 9 seconds per page.

- Site with highest download speed was again the e-Envoy site, and Local Government Association [LGA] had the slowest download speed of sites tested, the e-Envoy site some 57 times better.

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 February ’04, and a free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 25th April 2004.