Britannia Rules The SiteMorse League Table

Britannia Building Society spent most of 2004 near the bottom of the SiteMorse league table for Banks and Building Societies. Since then, reveals Linda Mellor – Britannia’s website manager, they’ve been using SiteMorse’s daily reports. These have helped them to stay at the top of the leagues tables this year:

“SiteMorse reports to help to identify what the issues were surrounding accessibility of the site. Once we’d identified what was wrong, we re-worked our entire site, re-coding our templates to meet the W3C standards. Since implementation we’ve continued to use the SiteMorse reports to help us to keep on top of changes and to ensure that we stay at the top of the table.”

Linda also speaks about Britannia’s ethical and commercial commitment to providing accessibility for all website users. The building society recognises the importance of disabled customers. She recognises, too, that there are some other more legal challenges for the financial sector, relating to the provision of disclaimers with regards to search engines.

At the moment it is very difficult for most financial organisations to provide all of the legal information that they are required to include next to their financial product promotions (e.g. mortgages). SiteMorse has a keyword identification tool that can help to solve this problem. She thinks that this might prove very useful and that she’d be interested in finding out more about it.

Mellor also recognises that website accessibility compliance helps to improve search engine optimisation. It can therefore help to gain a higher search engine ranking for its website. Meanwhile, she hopes to keep improving Britannia’s website and maintain her company’s position at the top of the SiteMorse league table.

By Graham Jarvis
Editor and Media Services Consultant
Email: gajarvis@sitemorse.com

11th May 2005