How the rankings work

Three methods were used by BlueRiverStone to rank the 150 companies in the survey: researchers have looked at the technical quality of the sites, their usability for investors, and the ability of the companies to deliver an e-mail response to investor related questions.

Technical Quality

This is principally a mechanical assessment of the website using Software Research’s eValid, a browser-based website assessment tool. It delivers a number of metrics, such as page size, broken links, site structure etc., all of which relate to the overall performance of the website and its quality.

Two important dimensions were used to rank each website:

Ease of user navigation. This factor is a combination of the average rate of download of pages, the depth of the pages within the website, and the number of successful page retrievals. A high score for ease of navigation means that users will have quick responses as they work on the site, and that they will find very few broken or unavailable pages.
Quality of website maintenance. This factor is based on the relative age of pages found on the website combined in part with the number of pages that are broken or unavailable. A well-maintained site has very-current information (young pages), and very reliable information (no unreachable pages). Combined, a quality score on these factors indicates that great care has been taken to assure the quality of the information.

Website usability and information architecture

The web usability index followed a scenario based on a private corporate investor who is investigating the top 150 companies as listed in the Fortune 500. The private investor has only the list of companies and therefore needs to establish the web address and from there locate important investor-related information on the website. The investor would also like to get some historical information on the company including the recent financial history (as contained in previous annual reports and the historical share price). In addition, the investor requires information that would enable them to contact an investor relations contact person for additional queries.

The index used the following six criteria:

Accessibility: the ability of the investor to easily infer the web address from the listed name of the company.
Navigability: the ease with which important investor information can be found on the website. This was assessed through the number of clicks required to find the important investor information.
Dynamic functionality: the ability of the website to cater for the diverse requirements of investors.
Additional content: other financial and investor related information was also considered important, but not necessarily essential. Five additional content items were identified; dividend payment information, legal disclaimers, accounting principles, independent analyst rating and corporate social responsibility.
Communication integration: the ability of the website to enable the investor to use different communication mechanisms (e.g. phone, fax, e-mail, post, personal visit) if they wished. This was assessed through the presence of l investor relations and other contact details.
Corporate identity: this was assessed through the ability of the website to provide a coherent and consistent corporate image that both projects the core nature of the corporation and presents a professional website. This criterion was the most subjective of the six.

E-mail responsiveness

Researchers assessed the ability of the company to respond to a standard e-mail inquiry in a timely manner as well as the quality of the response both in terms of the format and content. An e-mail was sent to those companies for whom an address could be found (either on the site or from a third party). This accounted for about 65 per cent of the companies. Web forms were filled in for a further 30 per cent of companies and the remaining 5 per cent had no means of online contact.

The e-mail request was:

“I am interested in your company and would appreciate having answers from you on what key corporate governance measures your company is taking, and in particular: Is risk management performance linked to individuals' performance targets and indicators? Do you report your risk management performance, key risk issues and your risk management intentions to all stakeholders?”

Scores

Each of the three categories was marked out of 100. The final score is produced with a 40% contribution from the Technical Quality score, 40% contribution from the Usability Score and finally a 20% contribution from the Email Score. This puts the emphasis in the final score on self service.

Exclusions and additions

The websites of four of the companies listed in the Fortune top 150 were not evaluated here. These were Pharmacia (which had merged with Pfizer) and Fleming, PG&E and UAL (which had all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy). The next four companies on the Fortune list were included in their place.