The Blog (ok it wasn’t just a ‘Blog’, we made lots of modifications) we created for them, and to which almost all the project participants contributed, was soon a-buzz with the project’s activities and the thoughts of those taking part. The Blog format is almost perfect for a recording/documentation project such as this, particularly one which lots of people or groups want to share and contribute to. The site is currently private, only the participants can use it, but hopefully when the project finishes in May we may be able to tidy up some of the raw edges and let the world take a look at what they’ve been up to. At the moment there are 135 posts, 80 images, 30 audio recordings, 37 videos and several dozen PDF files and word documents – which, given the scale of the project is a pretty comprehensive set of records I think.

Design-wise the site is very simple. It isn’t necessary or, given the objective, to some extent even desirable to go too far with the visual design (an archive doesn’t have to sexy and Villiers didn’t want this anyway). This keeps the costs down and lets us focus our energies on the content and organisational side of things, so the site works to the very limit of it’s capabilities (obviously this is budget dependent).

We would very much like to use this site as a model for further archival, documentation and/or “project process” projects in the future. We believe that, with certain important modifications, the simple Blog format has a lot to offer people working in that area.

Stars in a Story Screen Shot.

Kilroy James first surveyed this group, and a much larger group of smaller companies, in 2004 in order to get a picture of the general web design standards promoted and achieved by British companies. Now in its third year the survey has developed greatly, applying up to twenty tests during each homepage examination.

The FTSE 100 survey looks at WCAG Accessibility ratings, W3C technical testing, and the use (and omittance) of numerous usability features. It measures basic good design and technical practice. We view it and encourage others to view it as a benchmark of basic quality, indicating entry-level standards we think all web sites should meet.

Main findings

• 75% of homepages fail basic technical testing and 86% contain programming faults.
• 93% do not meet recommended accessibility standards (WCAG priority II). 56% do not meet the industry minimum standard.
• Less than a third (30%) provide properly resizeable text.
• 87% have a search facility on their web site, but only 71% present it on the homepage.
• The average score is 38%.

Interpretation of results

The best homepages meet basic standards and get the important things right. However, 86% do not meet basic standards, which is a poor figure lending a certain distinction to the 14% who do. Beyond standards conformance, the best sites achieve good accessibility ratings and show that the designer has considered Information Architecture and Usability issues.

The survey’s overall finding though is that the majority of tested homepages are poor (some are very poor indeed) and only a few would meet the standards required of a public sector web site, which isn’t very encouraging considering these are the UK’s largest companies.

Methodology

The survey tests the homepage of the main corporate web site for each member of the FTSE 100 and is in two parts: Basic and Extended. The Basic test looks at eleven aspects of a page’s design and implementation including: whether text resizing is properly implemented; W3C markup and CSS validation; and the presence, form and positioning of any search function. The Extended test looks at nine other elements including WCAG ratings.

We do not publish the exact survey methodology but it does account for qualities such as scrolling, title length and text resizeability, and the use of popup windows, splash pages and search functions.

The scoring method reflects the fact that the tests cover a range of faults with varying degrees of scope and seriousness. For example text resizeability is considered to be more important than whether a homepage scrolls or not: because scrolling is only bad if it makes the scrollbar difficult to use (and homepages are rarely that long, plus there are other ways to scroll a page) whereas a web page with unredeemably small text can, to people with less than perfect eyesight, be rendered unusable.

The 2006 survey was conducted during July and August; web pages may have changed since they were surveyed.