5.6

Website of Swedish postal service Posten.

posten.se April 2012

Posten merged with Post Danmark in 2009 and became Postnord (formally Posten Norden). As part of Postnord, Posten provides communication and logistics solutions to, from, and within the Nordic region. In Sweden Posten also provides what traditional postal services such as postage, collection and delivery. Their website received a complete redesign and change of CMS in mid April 2012.

Rating breakdown

Posten’s new website has generated the most peculiar rating to date on The Index. For a website of such a large organisation, launched in 2012, with a new design on a new platform, 5.6 is a very poor score. In fact, it would have received a much lower score it it hadn’t received a green tick from Google Page Speed.

It’s a dichotomy of forward innovation and backward steps, with the steps backwards winning. This was the first site tested where the previous version included standard technical features such as robots.txt and xml sitemaps but were missing from the new version.

Neither have I seen a site that has included accessibility features such as jump to navigation and keyboard shortcuts – that simply fail to work! Posten scored points briefly for a number of features, then instantly lost them as the feature was broken.

Posten has also become the first site on the Beantin Index to record a score of zero within a category. It received no points at all for SEO/SMO.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Posten's rating

As is often the case with relaunched websites, many old pages aren’t redirected making search engine result pages quite a mess. The poor implementation of basic SEO on the new site doesn’t help. Neither does the fact that hundreds of pages from the old site are still up and running via posten.com.

I’d normally like to highlight some positives, even on poorly rated sites, but Posten.se manages to under deliver across the board, with technical problems, accessibility issues, SEO and content shortcomings. It’s a surprising result and hopefully they will move quickly to correct and improve the site. Perhaps re-rating in the near future can show a significant improvement.

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

6.6

Website of the Swedish municipality of Stockholm, the City of Stockholm.

stockholm.se April 2012

The City of Stockholm’s website provides information about the region and the council for both visitors and residents as well as a number of e-services. The municipality covers the most central part of Stockholm with a population of over 800,000. Work on “stockholm.se version 2″ has been ongoing during the winter with a number of changes being made to the site. “version 1″ of the current site was launched in May 2008.

Rating breakdown

Stockholm stads website received a suprisingly average score. As with a number of websites rated so far, Stockholm scored particularly poorly within SEO. The website offered positive examples of many of the criteria in the Beantin Index, but was let down by inconsistency.

The City of Stockholm would benefit from better governance and guidance for its numerous web editors. After a little bit of a follow-up and some refresh-training, consistent publishing standards would allow the site would pick up a number of additional points.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Stockholm stad's rating

As with Skatteverket and Polisen, it was surprising to find such a large and well visited site that doesn’t have gzip compression enabled. This would speed up the site and save the council significant bandwidth.

Plus points to stockholm.se for using a standard login for their e-services (in the form of BankID) rather than creating their own.

Minus points for showing signs of so much good work, but failing to maintain quality across all pages within the site. Some examples being; inconsistent alt attributes, poor implementation of canonical links, neglect of how pages appear in the search results of external search engines, lack of captions on videos.

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

7.7

Website of the Swedish municipality of Köping.

koping.se April 2012

Köping municipality’s website provides information about the region and the council for both visitors and residents. The municipality is located in Västmanland County in the central part of Sweden with a population of just over 25000. The website tested was launched on 4 April 2011.

Rating breakdown

The Köping website scored highly across the board, with scores of over 70% in all categories apart from one. Köpings kommun scored terribly within Search engine optimisation and managed to record the lowest score ever for that category on the Beantin Index. With just a bit of housekeeping and small adjustments, the municipality of Köping would have taken the lead at the top of the index.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Köpings kommun's rating

In many cases where the website dropped points it was for reasonably minor (or easily fixed) issues, such as making the link text a slightly darker shade of blue to improve the colour difference between background and foreground.

Something quite concerning, but not specifically tested by The Beantin Index, was that the municipality’s old website is still online, accessible and index by the search engines. Certain searches such as eldning utomhus (Garden bonfires and outdoor fires) brings up the a link to the old site.

The existence of the old site creates a real risk for incorrect information to communicated and should be corrected (by closing the old site and redirecting the URLs) as soon as possible.

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

6.6

The Website of the Swedish tax authority, Skatteverket.

skatteverket.se February 2012

Skatteverket’s website provides information and details about the tax authorities services and their rules and regulations. It also has a number of online services, including the submission of tax returns and VAT declarations. The website was originally launched in 1996 and underwent it’s last significant redesign during autumn/winter 2009/10.

Rating breakdown

The Tax authority’s website received a very similar rating to their fellow public sector website, the Police Service. As with polisen.se, Skatteverket scored very highly for usability. It dropped points particularly for SEO and received a lower rating over all in part due to its average score for web tech.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Skatteverket's rating

Skatteverket, just like Polisen, doesn’t have Gzip compression enabled. This is surprising, especially considering that the web content is overwhelmingly text based.

There are only a small number of videos on skatteverket’s website, but only korvgubben goes bananas (a promotional video for the importance of receipts) has been produced with closed captions (Swedish and English). Unfortunately, a transcript of the video isn’t available. As all other videos lack subtitles and transcripts, Skatteverket failed to score for these points.

Although not part of the scoring for The Beantin Index, credit must be given to Skatteverket for the way that the site has incrementally been improved over the years. Even the major redesigns the site has gone though were relatively minor in comparison to the norm.

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

6.7

The Website of Swedish Police Service, Polisen.

polisen.se January 2012

Polisen’s website provides news about incidents, information about the services provided – including how to contact the police to report a crime. It also offers support information for victims of crime. It The website underwent a major redesign March 2009, and has been nominated for a Web Service Award in 2010 and 2011.

Rating breakdown

The Police Service website did especially well within usability, content and branding. The weakest categories were SEO and accessibility.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Polisen's rating

Interestingly, Polisen scored points on questions where very few other sites on The Index have – you would expect that this would lead to an outstanding rating, but Polisen dropped points due to some surprising misses.

There were also a number of technical misses that contributed to a low Google Page Speed score (37/100) – one such issue was that Gzip compression has not been enabled. This is a simple thing to fix and gives instant benefits through faster load times and reduced bandwidth consumption.

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

5.2

Website of daily evening newspaper Expressen.

www.expressen.se January 2012

Expressen’s website is a media site providing news and video content. The website (including its regional variations) is Sweden’s 2nd largest newspaper, according to number of visitors, of the four daily national newspapers – receiving almost 400,000 visitors on a normal weekday.

Rating breakdown

With it’s score of 5.2 Expressen was the lowest scoring of the four national Swedish newspapers (Aftonbladet, DN, SvD). The scores for usability and accessibility were amongst the lowest measured so far on the Beantin Index. Only good score was for search engine and social media optimisation, and technical implementation scoring respectably but not spectacularly.

Amongst the points dropped in the usability section was one for the confusing navigation and in particular the way in which sub-folders and sub-domains are both used for topic categories.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Expressen's rating

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

5.8

Website of daily morning newspaper Dagens nyheter.

www.dn.se January 2012

Dagens nyheter’s website is a media site providing news and video content. The website was judged to be Sweden’s best news website in Internet World’s Top 100 Sites of 2011. It is Sweden’s 3rd largest newspaper, according to number of visitors. An adjusted design was launched in October 2011 after a previous overhaul in 2009.

Rating breakdown

DN was surprisingly poor in most categories, resulting in the 2nd lowest score for a newspaper so far on The Index. Usability was the only category with a high score, and technical implementation was very low with a score of under 50% – the poorest web tech score of the big four Swedish newspapers.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of DN's rating

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

7.9

Website of daily morning newspaper Svenska dagbladet.

www.svd.se January 2012

Svenska dagbladet’s website is a media site providing news and video content. The website is Sweden’s smallest, according to number of visitors, of the four national daily newspapers.

Rating breakdown

SvD did well in all categories apart from accessability and ended up with a very high rating overall. The rating could have easily been higher if it wasn’t for some inconsistent application of some standards and techniques.

At the time of testing (Jan 3rd 2012), SvD’s score of 7.9 took the newspaper site to the top of the Beantin Index.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of SvD's rating

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index

7.3

Website of daily evening newspaper Aftonbladet.

www.aftonbladet.se January 2012

Aftonbladet’s website is a news portal providing news and video content. The website is Sweden’s most visited site with over 2 million people reading Aftonbladet online every day.

Rating breakdown

Aftonbladet scored extremely highly for search engine and social media optimisation, and was weakest within accessability and usability. It also scored high technically with many recommended techniques being deployed on the site.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Aftonbladet's rating

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0. This version of the index does not take into account the size of the web page, complexity, and the ratio of text content to code. If it did, Aftonbladet, which is large, complex, and code heavy, would have clearly scored lower.

Posted on The Beantin Index

7.4

Website of interaction designer Mårten Angner.

angner.se December 2011

Mårten has been self-employed for the majority of his working life, making corporate sites, e-commerce applications, interactive campaigns and mobile apps easy to understand and fun to use. The website is used as a blog as well as to promote his services within usability and design. The site was reviewed in December 2011.

Rating breakdown

Angner.se is a high scoring website, with a rating of over 7, and was strong within most categories. Content was the weakest area, but was by no means weak.

Spider graph showing the breakdown of Angner.se's rating

Rated using Beantin Index V1.0.

Posted on The Beantin Index