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 is based on the top 150 companies in the Fortune 500. It was carried out for FT-IT by BlueRiverStone, a South Africa-based internet research and benchmarking company (www.blueriverstone.com http://www.soft.com/eValid/BlueRiverStone/introduction.html), in partnership with eValid, a website testing and analysis service company (www.e-valid.com) that is part of San Francisco-based Software Research.

The research 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 (see notes to the main table for details of how the survey works). 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 skillful 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.

Here are some of the key findings from this part of the survey:

• Accessibility: All the companies had websites and all the websites ended with the suffix ".com". Only 25 sites did not score the full quota of points for this criterion. This was either as a result of having a website address that was not consistent with the listed company name, a non-intuitive abbreviation or extension (such as "inc" or "corp") of the company name, or a minor change to the name (e.g. hyphens removed, abbreviations have to be guessed more than once, etc). Many of the companies with instances of the first two options were ranked lowest overall.

• Navigability: 33 websites did not have a sitemap and a further 39 had sitemaps that were rudimentary for financial information. Very few websites (approximately six companies) were appalling in their navigation tools and layout. These companies generally fall in the lowest rankings. There were only 24 companies where a historical share price graph could not be located on the corporate website. The majority of share price graphs (86 companies) were located within one click of the investor relations section (sometimes on the homepage of the investor relations section). Surprisingly, 14 companies did not have information on the management or directors' profile on the website. The majority of websites (117) had this information within two clicks of the investor relations section. Also 44 companies did not have the corporate governance policy on the website - or, at least, it was not directly accessible, and may have been included in a PDF document.

• Dynamic functionality: A small number of companies (27) had no functionality on their historical share price graphs, and a relatively large number of companies (67) did not have their latest annual report in PDF and HTML formats. Most companies had an archive of annual reports that went back at least as far as 2000, although the majority of these reports were only in one format. Forty-six companies did not have any webcast information. The majority of companies with webcast facilities had archived webcasts but no information on future webcasts.

• Additional functional content: Twenty three companies had no information on dividends (e.g. no information on past dividends paid, a dividend payment policy or a dividend reinvestment plan), only one company had no legal disclaimer information, eight had no information on the financial accounting procedures (although this information was generally quite difficult to find on the websites), 60 had no information on analysts or analysts' ratings, and 19 had no information on corporate social responsibility. Generally this information was not predictive of a low overall ranking on the web usability index.

• Integration of communication media: As many as 38 companies had no direct contact details for an investor relations contact person or a suitable alternative. Only 35 had complete contact details for an investor relations contact person (i.e. name, telephone and fax number, and e-mail address). Most companies had physical address and postal address details on the website, although the benefit of the doubt was given in many cases (i.e. the physical address was often assumed to be the postal address). Only eight websites had information that would direct interested visitors to the corporate headquarters. This would mean that the majority of companies expect interested visitors (including investors) to either phone or e-mail for directions (if these details were available on the website). A large proportion of the companies (111) had the facility to request e-mail notification of upcoming meetings. Approximately 39 companies did not have this facility.

• Corporate identity: The majority of websites displayed fairly good corporate identity. This was often reflected in the consistency of the logos, the corporate colors and the general look-and-feel of the websites. Only 11 sites were viewed as having inadequate corporate identity. These were generally found towards the lower ranks of the web usability index. The difference between the mean score for technical quality, 71.84, and that for the usability assessment, 67.04, is 4.8 points. This seems to indicate that technical proficiency exceeds human factors.

• E-mail response: The e-mail response score, for which the mean score is just 38.63, is even more dependent on human intervention. There was no reply 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 on a Friday. Most responses occurred within three days, and 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.

About the Author: Ian Kruger is managing director of BlueRiverStone.