Site Analyzer Report #1: The Vitality of Children and Youth Web Sites
- We surveyed almost 1000 web sites belonging to organizations serving children and youth. As their “entry” page we selected the page that they themselves had indexed as such with a major nonprofit index service. Eliminating those for which there was inadequate data, we determined the number of days since that page was last revised.
In summary: We found the median age of the pages was over two months, the mean age was over four months, and less than 14% of pages had been revised within the last week. I will discuss “last modified” as one of many factors in determining the vitality and utility of a web site, acknowledge the limitations of this methodology, and bring up a few ideas for future study.
Site Analyzer Report #2: The Interactivity of Environmental Web Sites
- We surveyed over 500 web sites belonging to environmental organizations. As their “entry” page we selected the page that they had submitted as such with a respected online index of environmental resources. Eliminating those pages for which there were errors or insufficient data, for each page we determined whether it had email links or forms for user interaction.
In summary: We found that at least 65% of the front pages surveyed provided no online mechanism (either by email or by form) for contacting the organization sponsoring the site. We will discuss the value of these measurements in assessing the utility of a web site, explore the limitations of the methodology and develop some further ideas for future study.
Site Analyzer Report #3: The Accessibility of Disabilities Sites
- We surveyed over 200 web sites belonging to organizations working in support of people with disabilities. We used as our sample the home pages provided by these organizations to an established list of disabilities resources. Discarding those pages for which the URL provided failed, we ran each page through a well accepted routine for determining compliance with the current standards for web page accessibility.
In summary, we found that nearly 65% of the sites had one or more accessibility errors. Nearly 80% had some sort of browser compatibility error that might lead to an access problem. 20% of the sites took more than 30 seconds to load, though most took much less. No site had more than three access errors, indicating that whatever problems do exist would be easy to repair.
This sample is not at all representative of nonprofit web sites as a whole. The sample was deliberately selected because it would be likely to have the lowest number of problems, given the issue focus of the organizations. We will also discuss the value of these numbers and of web accessibility tools in general.