Banking Report July 04 - top Coop, bottom Abbey

08 Jul 2004

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Overview of findings

Top of the league and best site overall was Co-operative Bank, in second place Newcastle Building Society. At the bottom of the table representing the poorest site overall was again Abbey [formally Abbey National].

Website Function
- 1 sites are error free this month, LloydsTSB. 38% of sites had 10 errors or less. The site with the highest number of errors was Coventry Building Society with over 3,000.

Website Performance
- 125 of the sites tested passed all basic speed tests, looking at first page download. Simulated as being viewed by a home [56k], ADSL [512k] and user with corporate access [1mb].

- Site with fastest overall server response was Birmingham Midshires. The site with the slowest response time was Abbey. Abbey over 51 times slower than Birmingham Midshires.

- Site with highest download speed was Bank of England; Band of Ireland had the slowest download speed of sites tested, to put in context the Bank of Ireland site was 94 times slower.

Website Compliance
- HTML - Site with the lowest number of warnings [HTML standards compliance with the requirements laid down by W3C and IETF] was again Co-operative with 87. British Banking Association had the highest number of warnings, with over 67,000.

- Accessibility – Nationwide was the only site that scored 100%, 32% sites scored 90%+ on the automated tests looking at the requirements of Priority 1 (A) accessibility, 4 sites had less than 1% compliance when tested against the mandatory requirements for Priority 1 accessibility.

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.