Britannia Building Society says it values the new SiteMorse automated website testing and monitoring service for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The building society leads the SiteMorse banking sector league table for the best website quality, performance and accessibility compliance. It feels that this comprehensive, easy to use and affordable offering could prove to be an invaluable tool, saving SMEs both time and money. It also provides SMEs with the ability to use tools that until now have only been available to corporate firms. SiteMorse offers a range of performance, accessibility and functional testing to ensure that your website is delivering the best possible, compliant experience to help to attract new customers and keep existing ones.
Jayne Scarratt of Britannia’s Corporate Communications department explains: “SiteMorse provide an in-depth and independent assessment of Britannia’s website, as well as benchmarking us. The survey highlights areas where performance can be improved and would therefore be beneficial to organisations of all sizes, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SiteMorse’s feedback allows Britannia to maintain the high quality of the website and ensure that http://www.britannia.co.uk is available to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities, such as visual impairment.”
Why is the new service important?
Ben Pinnington of the Forum for Private Business, a professional organisation that supports SMEs (a term which describes a company between 5 and 50 employees), also describes the Internet as ‘a galaxy of opportunity for small businesses’ that shouldn’t be missed. He adds: “It is a tremendous and remarkable marketing tool.”
SMEs don’t usually have the financial and human resources, or even the available I.T expertise and knowledge, of the large corporates. So they depend more on the web than any other sector to increase their market penetration. In fact Netbenefit’s report ‘The State of the eNation Survey 2004’, which examines UK-wide attitudes towards e-business, also reveals that “SMEs are becoming more dependent on the Internet”, and what makes their buying decisions very much focus on reliability, and not just with regards to connectivity.
The research, which NetBenefit commissioned Vanson Bourne to complete – an independent market research firm – interviewed 150 SME owners across the UK. The study found that 66% of them “currently receive as much as 25% of their business revenue through their website, and 62% predict that this will increase in 2005.” Many will be investing more money over the course of this year to achieve greater value from their websites.
An error free website is therefore vital, particularly as it will ensure that a wide range of customers are able to interact, and even to buy products and services online. Remember, if you are an SME and you don’t have a compliant website, you could lose existing and potential customers.
SMEs and the Disability Discrimination Act
SMEs also have a legal duty to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act. The Act requires organisations that sell products, services and which provide information over the web to provide a reasonable level of accessibility. Although there is no precedence to date, if you are an SME, you could be taken to court and have to pay heavy fines. So it’s important that you don’t fail to make the right decisions, and you must meet the very basic levels of website accessibility compliance, based upon the World Wide Web Consortium’s W3C guidelines and its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Pennington also supported the idea of organisations like SiteMorse and FPB working together to inform and educate SMEs about the importance of having a useable and accessible website that delivers value and performs without error. However, he thinks that the initiative must first come from the Government. SiteMorse is, in fact, already working hard within the Public Sector, as the leading supplier of website testing, to promote automated testing and monitoring and the imperative of having an error free compliant websites.
Meanwhile, SiteMorse invites SMEs to learn more about this issue, and how they can have a quality, error free and well performing websites – just like Britannia Building Society, Natwest, Capita, BT, TMP (Monster.com) and British Airways – by visiting http://www.sitemorse.com, where they can take advantage of a free website test and receive a free report.
By Graham Jarvis
Editor and Media Services Consultant
Email: editor@cimtech.org
Media-Insert Communications 
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