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19th December 2007 – Mediasurface, provider of the Morello web content management (WCM) solution, recently conducted its 7th website accessibility and performance report in partnership with website testing company, SiteMorse, focusing on the UK Financial Services sector. The report, which is e-mailed to over 6,500 business and IT contacts in the sector, enables companies to benchmark themselves against each other in a website super league. The report looks at six key criteria; accessibility; first page (metadata and download times); performance; site errors; code quality and overall site download speed; and highlights which companies are taking these website issues seriously and identifies those that have a long way to go.
Over 334,300 URLs were tested, including for the first time testing of accessible PDF documents, and despite this being the 7th report the results are staggering;
· 16% of websites still had 100% of their pages failing the basic ‘A’ accessibility (W3C grade) –which is a slight improvement on the 18% achieved in April 2006.
· 44.8% of all web pages failed basic ‘A’ accessibility and 97% failed ‘AA’ accessibility
· 9.1% of web pages failed functionally generally whereas over 78% of pages failed code standards
· A third of the web pages tested were missing metadata
· The review of PDF accessibility revealed that 82% of all PDF documents tested failed
The recent winners in this sector include Julian Hodge Bank, Bradford & Bingley and Birmingham Midshires who came first, second and third respectively. A number of top high street brands scored towards the bottom of the table. The full report is available at www.hellomorello.com/smfinance07.
Deployment of a good WCM system, such as Morello, is one of the easiest ways to enforce good design and accessibility, thereby improving rankings and also search engine optimization (SEO). Morello has the ability to centrally manage the content, which can be classified and categorised in a standard way. Websites can be better structured, the content can be re-used, meaningful internal URLs links can be managed and ALT commands can be made mandatory in images, PDFs etc. The resulting website will therefore confirm to a company’s brand standards, achieve the top level ‘AAA’ accessibility as well as be primed for SEO.
The report is well received and highlights a topic that many organisations are struggling to resolve. By placing companies in a table with their closest competitors, it provides a direct comparison and this has enabled many people to get instant recognition of their website problems and to focus on fixing the structure and design so that best practice accessibility guidelines can be met.
Andy Peart, Chief Marketing Officer at Mediasurface comments; “Over the last few years the Financial Services Sector in the UK has grappled with website accessibility and performance issues, however there is still a wide gap between debate and action. Morello has the capability to assist organisations in improving their websites to enable them to optimise their online customer services.”
Ends
About SiteMorse
SiteMorse offers a range of website testing services that require no setup, downloads or technical support to operate. SiteMorse measures performance, tests functions and checks compliance (HTML / eGMS / Accessibility etc). Testing services include; website monitoring (individual pages every few minutes, includes R25 reporting), thorough website checking (testing from a few pages to a complete site) and website user experience (load and stress and user journey testing). All services offer detailed diagnostic reporting, identifying problems by exact type, page, line, etc to facilitate immediate cost effective corrective action.
Over 500 local and central government, FTSE and Bank clients use SiteMorse to help them maintain error-free, fully functioning and compliant websites and they are in the 4th year of working with SOCITM. SiteMorse is also used by Gov. Sector Publishing, Blays Netratings and ISPA for website rankings and awards services.
About Mediasurface
The first joint Mediasurface and SiteMorse report was conducted in April 2006 on 356 financial institutions which included high street banks, investment banks, fund managers, building societies and insurance companies. Since then the report has grown to include nearly 1,000 organisations including the legal sector and professional services organizations.
For more information please contact:
GBC
020 8322 1922
mediasurface@gbc.co.uk
Posted December 19th, 2007 by GBC
