A simple idea – selling a million pixels on some specially commissioned drawings by political satirist Steve Bright; and in the process gathering messages from people who want to make a protest to the Labour Government. There’s some shopping to do as well!

Visitors to the site are invited to join the prisoners by purchasing a ‘hypothetical’ pixel and leaving their messages to Labour. Each message can be viewed on the site and form part of the tagclouds (which highlight the most important words from peoples’ messages), eventually to be delivered to No.10 a week before the next general election.

The idea was brought to us by David Barrett, an artist and very disappointed Labour supporter, who wanted an elegant structure and funky-yet-retro design for the website. The brief included an ecommerce element so that the ‘prisoners’ can buy hoodies and T shirts as easily as possible. We hope they reach their targets – so if you’re a disgruntled labour supporter, why not pop on over to Million Prisoners and do something about it!

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.