Website usability and information architecture details

BlueRiverStone used six criteria to assess the usability of the sites. Here are details of how the 150 companies performed:

Accessibility

All the companies had websites and all the websites ended with the suffix “.com”. Only 25 sites did not score the full quota of points for this criterion. This was either as a result of having a website address that was not consistent with the listed company name, a non-intuitive abbreviation or extension (such as “inc” or “corp”) of the company name, or a minor change to the name (e.g. hyphens removed, abbreviations have to be guessed more than once, etc). Many of the companies with instances of the first two options were ranked lowest overall.

Navigability

There were only 24 companies where a historical share price graph could not be located on the corporate website. The majority of share price graphs (86 companies) were located within one click of the investor relations section (sometimes on the homepage of the investor relations section). The latest annual report was found on the website for all the companies, and within two clicks of the investor relations section. A news article was also found on the website for all companies, although sometimes more than three clicks away from the investor relations section.

Surprisingly, 14 companies did not have information on the management or directors’ profile on the website. The majority of websites (117 companies) had this information within two clicks of the investor relations section.

It was also remarkable that 44 companies did not have the corporate governance policy on the website. Some of these companies may have had corporate governance information within PDF documents (such as the annual report). These were not considered to be directly accessible off the website unless the PDF was specifically labelled as a corporate governance policy (or a similar name).

There were 33 websites that did not have a sitemap and a further 39 websites where the sitemap that was present was rudimentary for financial information. Very few websites (approximately six companies) were appalling in their navigation tools and layout. These companies generally fall in the lowest rankings.

Dynamic functionality

A small number of companies (27) had no functionality on their historical share price graphs, and a relatively large number of companies (67) did not have their latest annual report in PDF and HTML formats. Most companies had an archive of annual reports that went back at least as far as 2000, although the majority of these reports were only in one format. Forty-six companies did not have any webcast information. The majority of companies with webcast facilities had archived webcasts but no information on future webcasts.

Additional functional content

Twenty three companies had no information on dividends (e.g. no information on past dividends paid, a dividend payment policy or a dividend reinvestment plan), only one company had no legal disclaimer information, eight had no information on the financial accounting procedures (although this information was generally quite difficult to find on the websites), 60 had no information on analysts or analysts’ ratings, and 19 had no information on corporate social responsibility. Generally this information was not predictive of a low overall ranking on the web usability index.

Integration of communication media

As many as 38 companies had no direct contact details for an investor relations contact person or a suitable alternative. Only 35 had complete contact details for an investor relations contact person (i.e. name, telephone and fax number, and e-mail address). Most companies had physical address and postal address details on the website, although the benefit of the doubt was given in many cases (i.e. the physical address was often assumed to be the postal address). Only eight websites had information that would direct interested visitors to the corporate headquarters. This would mean that the majority of companies expect interested visitors (including investors) to either phone or e-mail for directions (if these details were available on the website). A large proportion of the companies (111) had the facility to request e-mail notification of upcoming meetings. Approximately 39 companies did not have this facility.

Corporate Identity

The majority of websites displayed fairly good corporate identity. This was often reflected in the consistency of the logos, the corporate colors and the general look-and-feel of the websites. Only 11 sites were viewed as having inadequate corporate identity. These were generally found towards the lower ranks of the web usability index.