eValid™ -- Automated Web Quality Solution Browser-Based, Client-Side, Functional Testing & Validation, Load & Performance Tuning, Page Timing, Website Analysis, and Rich Internet Application Monitoring.

Summary
How do the WebSites of the Top 10 E-Tailers compare in terms of Best Online Experience?

Goals
For this comparative analysis of websites we define two important dimensions that allow us to rank order each website in terms of Best Online Experience:

• Ease of Navigation. This factor is a combination of the average rate of download of pages 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 website, and that they will find very few broken or unavailable pages.
• Quality of Maintenance. This factor is based on the relative age of pages found on the website. A well-maintained website has very-current information, and indicates that great care has been taken to assure the quality of the information.

We used the eValid site analysis engine, programmed (see below) to collect specific metrics that contribute to these factors. To assure accuracy the measurements were done over a short time frame, with identical eValid parameter settings, and using identical access capabilities.

Results
The measurements we made of the webstes of 10 well known E-Tail Companies produced the relative Best Online Experience comparison chart shown.

The best-performing WebSites are in the upper right of the chart, and the worst-performing WebSites are in the lower left of the chart.

Individual Summary Results
The table below shows all of the results used to construct the comparative chart. Click to see the eValid Summary Report with the raw data. Click to see the 3D-SiteMap for each WebSite.

#	Company	Click For Summary Report	Comments On Website Performance	Click For 3D-SiteMap	Comments on Website Structure
1	www.circuitcity.com	eValid Report	A: Very large site, sometimes slow, very good quality.		B: Good backlink structure, reasonably well balanced, some structural problems.
2	www.eddiebauer.com	eValid Report	A+: Top score, moderate size, quick and clean.		B-: Slightly top heavy, fairly good backlink structure, to many thin layers (suggest disorganization).
3	www.jcpenney.com	eValid Report	B+: Small, quick, and clean, good navigational approach.		A+: Small, clean, well behaved and well structured. Possibly uses different web page technology.
4	www.llbean.com	eValid Report	C-: Moderate size, many oldish pages, tends to be sluggish.		A-: Good spread factors, adequately balanced but with some bad spots, generally good symmetry.
5	www.lowes.com	eValid Report	B-: Very large site, complex organization, some pages are slow.		B+: Very large site, reasonably clean organzation, slight tendency to be top heavy, good backlink support.
6	www.niketown.com	eValid Report	B-: Moderate size, many old pages, relatively clean.		B: Good spread factors, tends to be top heavy, some problem spots.
7	www.payless.com	eValid Report	F: Very large site, performance spotty, sometimes very slow.		C-: Enormous backlink structure, minimal forward links, but 10 layers deep, yet still top heavy.
8	ww.staples.com	eValid Report	A: Moderate size, compact and neat, some slow pages.		A+: Clean, symmetric, good layering, good backlink structure.
9	www.walgreens.com	eValid Report	A: Very large, very big pages, clean but slow.		B: Top of structure is light, bottom is heavy but most slow/large pages are there.
10	www.walmart.com	eValid Report	B-: Enormous size, high link count, complex to navigate, sometimes slow.		C: Very steep tree, some lightly populated layers (implies disorganization), very heavy backlink structure (too heavy?).

Methodology
To collect the data used in the chart we used the eValid WebSite analysis engine with parameter settings as follows:

• Search Mode. We used the Full Browser mode for the greatest reality. using the cache (all pages are freshly downloaded).
• Extent of Search. All of these tests were done with a maximum URL count of 2,500 pages.
• Large Page Threshold. We chose a moderate 50 KByte limit for this factor to single out big, slow pages.
• Slow Page Threshold. We chose a 3.0 sec threshold to decide if a page was slow loading.
• Old Page Threshold. Here we chose a threshold of 1 day (24 hrs) to emphasize the stability of the site.
• Broken/Unavailable Link Counts. This factor is expressed as a percentage of the total number of URLs visited.

Web Access Details
All tests were done on a 384 Kbps (peak performance value) ADSL connection. The data was collected with successive eValid site analysis runs made during normal business hours (Pacific Time).