Top of the League Table and best site overall was the Privy Council; with the CSA in second place. At the bottom of the table, representing the poorest site overall was UK Online for Business.

eGMS
In testing sites for compliance with the government’s standards for metadata and eGMS (electronic government meta data standard), 3 sites are virtually fully compliant [2 of which are Sitemorse™ user’s], 4 sites are only around 1% compliant and the remaining sites have none of the mandatory data, and failed on every single page. This month’s top site is UK Sport.

Accessibility
12 sites passed tests for compliance with the requirements of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines [an improvement from our previous report], 19 sites failed on virtually all pages [with less than 10% of pages complying]. and 4 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 (again) Local e-Government; Human Rights had the highest number of errors with over 530.
- Site with the lowest number of warnings [poor html] was (again) Invest to Save Budget; Work Train had the highest number of warnings with over 28,000 - in terms of website quality, this was the worst site.
- 52% of sites tested failed basic metadata tests for their front page.
- Site with the fastest overall server response time was Transport for London, where average page response was 0.041 seconds. The site with the slowest server response time was (again) the Rail Regulators, where average page response was over 21 seconds per page – 525 times slower than the best site.
- Site with the highest download speed was the Crown Prosecution Service, and E-venturing had the slowest download speed of the sites tested.

The findings take into account site size; e.g. a website with 10 pages and 1 error scores the same as a website with 100 pages and 10 errors, as both have the same page/error ratio of 10:1. Ratings are based on the many millions of website tests conducted.

Tests were carried out on the top 250 pages of each site and were completed on the 31st March 2004. A free copy of your own site summary is available on request. Our next report will be produced around the 15th May 2004.