Building.co.uk’s survey of the top 50 contractors revealed that many of the biggest names in the industry are failing to make their websites accessible to all users

Southern Electrical Contracting has come top in a survey of contractor’s websites, exclusive to Building.co.uk.

It pipped Bowmer & Kirkland to first place in a survey of 50 contractors by web testing provider SiteMorse on behalf of Martin Hornagold of the Marstan Group.

SiteMorse ranked the contractors’ websites according to criteria such as whether links worked, whether they were accessible to users with disabilities, the speed of downloads and the quality of the coding (sloppy coding can affect a site’s appearance on particular browsers).

The site with the fastest response time was www.laingorourke.com, although the contractor only came in 35th, overall.

The survey showed that 94% of the websites passed functionality tests – those with broken links and navigation that moved users away from the site were marked down.

The results were less impressive for coding standards – only 16.8% pages passed – and for accessibility, where almost 50% of pages failed to meet the most basic of three levels. Even worse, 11 of the sites failed accessibility standards on every page.

From these statistics it is clear that many industry websites could be improved. Everyone who uses the internet is adept at assessing the quality of sites. If a site is slow or difficult to navigate, the user will leave.

In the weeks to follow, we will release more tables for architects, project managers and surveyors and Martin Hornagold will explain why some sites work and others fall short.

Downloads