By Andy McCue, 30 March 2004 17:45
NEWS Many UK banking websites are failing on performance with poor accessibility, HTML coding errors and slow response times greeting visitors, according to a new study.
The best of the 32 sites were Birmingham Midshires and The Co-operative Bank, which topped the table compiled by website testing firm Business2www. Propping up the league were the Bank of Ireland, Abbey and Britannia.
Only two sites were error-free – Birmingham Midshires and Lloyds TSB, while Coventry Building Society had four times more errors than any other site. Examples of errors found in the study include images missing from a page at Barclays' website and internal broken links at the HBOS corporate site.
Warning messages are an indicator of poor HTML coding and the site with the lowest number of warnings was Co-operative Bank with 87. AIB had the highest number of warnings with more than 41,000, followed by Halifax with over 16,000.
Only eight sites passed the basic speed test for the front page using a modem, ADSL connection and a network-based user. The site with the fastest overall server response time was HFC Bank with an average page response of 0.02 seconds, compared to Yorkshire Bank, which was slowest at 21 seconds per page.
The sites were also tested against the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, which aim to ensure people with disabilities are not prevented from accessing information on the website – though this score was not factored into the overall results.
Britannia had no pages that were WAI-compliant and 10 sites scored less than five per cent compliance. Eight achieved greater than 90 per cent with Royal Bank of Scotland coming top.
A similar survey carried out by the company last month found many public sector sites were flouting the government's own guidelines.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Some banks do not fully support Apple's Mac OS X operating system.
For example, Smile's stance has been that they hope to support Mac's 'soon' since at least last summer.
NatWest let Mac users log on with the now unsupported Microsoft Internet Explorer: mac, but using this browser does not allow all features to be used.
They suggest using Netscape 4.7 to get full functionality from their site on a Mac, despite the fact that this version does not run on OS X. The OS X compatible Netscape 7.1 is not able to access the missing features - therefore OS X users are effectively unable to attain full feature parity with Windows users of NatWest online banking.
NatWest don't support the default OS X browser, Apple's 'Safari' at all.
2. Stuart Charman
Who conducted this study and where can we get hold of a copy of the report? A link would be nice...
(Ed note. Read the article again - all the way down to the second paragraph, where you will see it says who conducted the research. Hope that helps.)
3. anonymous
NatWest deleted my login during a "server upgrade" and i haven't been able to get in since.
4. John Chapman
Don't know how Co-op got to top of list.
Their personal banking web site is fine.
However their Smile and new Acumen business banking sites only support Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Acumen is also very difficult to use as it is a software package with a web front end, not a web application.
5. anonymous
At last someone is following up on this problem. My own experience with nat West Home bank is that it's a yapping dog of a site. Poor accessibility in this case means that it doesn't like my Mac and I couldn't log on most of the time without increasingly psychiatric sessions with their help desk. This assumes that one has not mislaid the three levels of password necessary to register and use the site, random bits of which have to be typed in to obtain access. I have not bothered to re-register since losing one or other component.
My knowledge of the less than highly competitive UK clearing bank market suggested that none of them would be much better so the hassle of changing banks would be hard to justify. This report confirms my suspicions.
If I contrast this with e-banking in Belgium, it's a different world. Instead of badly coded web sites with user-hostile security, transactions are prepared offline using a client software supplied by the bank, in Linux, Mac and Windows flavours. Update info passes through a Java module over an encrypted IP link to the bank's servers. This is easy, reliable and a pleasure to use. Well done ING and a tip of the cap to Kredietbank for getting it right.
6. anonymous
At last someone is following up on this problem. My own experience with nat West Home bank is that it's a yapping dog of a site. Poor accessibility in this case means that it doesn't like my Mac and I couldn't log on most of the time without increasingly psychiatric sessions with their help desk. This assumes that one has not mislaid the three levels of password necessary to register and use the site, random bits of which have to be typed in to obtain access. I have not bothered to re-register since losing one or other component.
My knowledge of the less than highly competitive UK clearing bank market suggested that none of them would be much better so the hassle of changing banks would be hard to justify. This report confirms my suspicions.
If I contrast this with e-banking in Belgium, it's a different world. Instead of badly coded web sites with user-hostile security, transactions are prepared offline using a client software supplied by the bank, in Linux, Mac and Windows flavours. Update info passes through a Java module over an encrypted IP link to the bank's servers. This is easy, reliable and a pleasure to use. Well done ING and a tip of the cap to Kredietbank for getting it right.