London South Bank University leads the way for digital governance in the Q2 2018 Sitemorse INDEX

18 Jun 2018 | Index | Public sector

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LSBU

London, 18th June 2018 – London South Bank University is the UK’s leading higher educational institution for digital governance and has once again come in first place in the field in the latest Sitemorse INDEX.

The Sitemorse INDEX reviews sites, scoring and ranking them based on optimisation, experience, compliance and technical factors such as loading speed and accessibility.

Congratulations go to London South Bank University for leading the table with an overall score of 7.0 out of 10, reflecting a good standard of optimisation and content delivery. The site came first for performance and near the top of the chart for HTML, email and metadata. However, it only scored 5 for functionality and 6 for accessibility, showing that there remains room for improvement.

The University of Lincoln was the top riser on the chart, increasing its score from 2.98 to 5.5 and climbing 292 places. The university improved the functionality and accessibility of its site and particularly improved the standard of HTML.

Also in the top five were:

2. Chesterfield College – scoring 6.6

3. Birmingham Metropolitan College – scoring 6.6

4. Myerscough College – scoring 6.6

5. Dudley College – scoring 6.4

Issues found on low performing sites included broken links, missing images, faulty email addresses and webpages that lacked titles and descriptions. Many institutions appear to be unaware of the substantial issues that are discovered and given an increased focus on digital accessibility, both in legislation and litigation, it’s important to ask exactly what is going and to demand improvement.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), said, “In the current climate it’s really essential for universities and higher educational institutions to make sure that they are delivering when it comes to accessibility, functionality and performance. Failing to do this will result in a poor user experience but it will also put the institution at a very real risk of being sued – and all too often performance is appalling. We believe that the answer to all this lies in automated digital governance monitoring. Our service delivers prioritised, actionable recommendations to ensure that non-technical staff can make major changes, fast.”

The results of the INDEX were based on a total of over 115m tests on public pages carried out in April 2018. Every page on every site surveyed was subjected to over 1,600 unique tests, checks and measures. These include searching for broken links; running WCAG 2.0 accessibility checks; testing HTML code; gauging site performance; reviewing whether titles are set for web pages and PDFs; and checking that emails are correctly formed.

Other sectors covered by a Sitemorse INDEX include the UK Retail 500, UK police forces, UK local government and the life sciences sector.

The Sitemorse INDEX report is carried out by Sitemorse, which helps clients to continuously and automatically monitor for issues relating to optimisation, experience and compliance (including SEO and accessibility) on public and private pages. The findings of the latest report, for Q2 2018, will be released over the course of May and June 2018. The full results for the UK Universities and Higher Education sector can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1415&key=3eefe060

 

About the Sitemorse INDEX

Since 2002, the Sitemorse INDEX has provided an independent industry standard for benchmarking digital governance. Sites are reviewed and scored based on some 1,600 tests, checks and measures per page, identifying actions that improve optimisation, experience and compliance. Since its inception, it has been the fundamental measure of digital capability for organisations that strive for online excellence.

Scoring highly typically reflects those that have strong digital leadership and understand the importance of providing the best visitor experience possible – and it reflects positively on the entire organisation’s operations and branding.

Sitemorse carried out over 115m tests on public pages in April 2018 in order to build the INDEX. These results provide extensive insights into the experience that these sites deliver and offer vital information on how they can better meet audience expectations – points that are crucial, but impractical to capture manually. Indeed, organisations are all too often unaware of what might be simple actions that they could take that would offer immediate improvements to their delivery.

 

About Sitemorse

Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps organizations to efficiently drive improved user experience, ensuring that content is always optimised and that compliance requirements are always met. With clients in every corner of the world, Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) sets out to remove endless reporting from Digital Governance and to instead provide actionable insights so that major changes can be made quickly.

The company has now been moving the field of Digital Governance forwards for over 15 years, while remaining privately owned, and continues to provide clients with new tools and capabilities every year. Most recently, this has included a focus on extending capabilities directly within the CMS, as well as addressing the governance / QA service issue of ‘endless reporting’.

Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps digital managers to build strong processes and accountability, to minimise risks and to achieve the highest standards of content quality. And with Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), there is no need for the substantial infrastructure, support and accordant costs that are required for manual quality and compliance checks.