1. Introduction
2. How the Rankings Worked
3. Usability Metrics
4. Results (HTML)
5.  Results (61Kb)

Financial Times Online Investor Relations Survey

Introduction

US corporate websites are in general more advanced technically than they are user friendly, according to an exclusive survey of the country’s top 150 companies that focuses on the needs of investors and potential investors.
    The survey was carried out for FT-IT by BlueRiverStone, a South Africa-based internet research and benchmarking company in association with e-Valid, a US based, website analysing and testing software producer. It is based on the top 150 companies in the Fortune 500.

     It is similar to Webranking 2003, a survey of Europe’s top 150 corporate websites for investors, which was produced by Sweden’s Hallvarsson & Halvarsson and published in the November 26 FT-IT.

    The US survey covers three categories: technical quality, website usability and e-mail response, all of which were marked out of 100. It was conducted in mid-October.

    In the first category, US corporate websites have demonstrated a good technical proficiency, with some glaring exceptions. Slightly more than half scored higher than 70 in this category. There is a lot more variation in how well maintained the sites are than in their speed. The latter is mainly a function of skilful programming but the former requires a different approach, and on the whole companies have not done as well on this measure.  Nevertheless about 44 per cent of the companies that formed part of this study were above the means on both dimensions.

 In the second category, web usability, 135 of the websites scored 50 or more, and 12 scored 80 or higher. The largest proportion of websites (62) scored between 70 and 79. Only one, Berkshire Hathaway, scored below 30 in this category. (See separate article for more details on the usability findings).

    The difference between the mean score for technical quality, 72.2, and that for the usability assessment, 65.3, is 6.9 points. This seems to indicate that technical proficiency exceeds human factors.

The e-mail response score, for which the mean score is 38.63, is even more dependent on human intervention. There was no reply with in the allotted 25 days time span from 38 per cent of companies, and only 49.4 per cent of e-mails received were direct replies to the original e-mail, which asked about corporate governance and risk management. Of the total number of companies the inquiry was sent to, 52 per cent replied.

    Researchers sent out e-mails or submitted web forms during the course of a Friday. Most responses occurred within three days, the most responses were received that same day. Better response times might be expected at other times during the week. One conclusion for investors is that if you have not received a reply within three days, you should send a reminder if you are still interested in the company.

    There is a caveat, however: there is a weak but significant negative correlation between time to respond and content scores. This means that researchers tended to get better responses from those companies that took their time. In fact it seems that those that had to be reminded were more forthcoming in their responses.