SiteMorse - Alliance & Leicester 1st, LloydsTSB Last

Alliance & Leicester Come First and LloydsTSB Last in Business2wwws Comparative League Table of the UKs Top High Street Bank and Building Society Public Websites. We will also ran tests on the main websites of the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the British Bankers Association (BBA).

Tuesday 26th June 2002, 11.00am GMT (website)

Press Release

SOURCE: Business 2 www plc.

Alliance & Leicester Come First and LloydsTSB Last in Business2wwws Comparative League Table of the UKs Top High Street Bank and Building Society Public Websites. We will also ran tests on the main websites of the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the British Bankers Association (BBA). To order Email us.

When included the BBA site came last overall. To order a copy of the results table click.

In the last week we have applied our unique and increasingly powerful SiteMorse automated site testing software to test the, rate and compare the 'public-facing websites of the UKs top Banks and Building Societies -- i.e. all those listed as having over 60 branches in Mainland Great Britain.

• Banks

Abbey National

Alliance & Leicester

Bank of Scotland

Barclays

Clydesdale

Cooperative

Halifax

HSBC

Lloyds TSB

Natwest

Northern

Northern Rock

Royal Bank of Scotland

Yorkshire

• Building Societies

Bradford & Bingley

Birmingham Midshires

Britannia

Nationwide

Portman

Skipton

Yorkshire

The July Report and League Table will be the first of four quarterly Reports, which will be repeated in October 2002, and January and April 2003.

The Reports test, rate and rank the websites on four key performance-driving criteria :

• Errors (including Error Occurrences and Errors per Page).

• HTML Warnings (and Warnings per Page).

• Server Response Time.

• Calculated Download Speed (especially critical in the Banking Sector).

There are considerable variations between websites, but on average Bank and Building Society Sites are larger, have more errors and - most importantly - run at only half the speed compared with the corporate websites of the UK FTSE 100.

The primary comparisons are based on B2W Benchmarks which have been developed over the last eight months, during which we have tested over 4,500 websites and over 14 million URLs in corporate and commercial websites in virtually every industry and service sector.

The Reports cost 3,000.00 plus Vat (3,525.00) each, or 10,000.00 plus Vat for all four ordered in advance and paid for in four equal instalments. To order Email us.

With the report you will also receive four confidential Full Technical Reports on your own site ONLY, with comparisons where applicable with the average of the 21 sites listed above, and with the averages for the corporate websites of the UK FTSE 100

You can order your Report(s), and obtain further information on our services and site testing products generally, and/or the Banks and Building Societies Report and League Table specifically, by e-mailing us at Email us.

The Banking and Financial Services Sector has made a very considerable initial and continuing investment in website development, and it has an increasing importance in providing products, services, information and communication to new and existing customers, as well as containing customer handling costs. Relative and competitive Website performance is already a choice-determining factor for your customers, especially the younger, more affluent, more active and more profitable. We hope very much that you will use the Report and the Full Test on your own site as a thoroughly helpful means of testing our unique service.

About Business2www plc.

Business2www is a global provider of SiteMorse, the worlds most advanced automated website testing system. Based in the UK, the company has developed a unique suite of site testing products and services that inspect every element of every page of even the most complex, dynamic web sites.

Services have been supplied in the UK, US and Australasia. Customers include; Marks and Spencer, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Logica plc, Warburtons, Co-operative Bank, Grant Thornton and many others.

Only B2Ws unique software can generate the necessary breadth, depth, and frequency of website audits necessary to maximize ROI and provide the best experience possible to your sites visitors.