Hi there! Welcome to our blog. Don't forget to sign up for our free RSS feed. We Triple Dog Dare Ya! And thanks for visiting!

We’re in the middle of a fascinating internal project right now: surveying the web sites of Fortune 1000 companies. Basically, we’ve taken our spidering software and pointed them at a current list of Fortune 1000 web sites. We run two spiders at a time, 24 hours a day, and they patiently tabulate each web site, counting up pages and documents as they go. These spiders also catalog pages that are unreachable or more than 30 days old (in other words, stale).

What’s the point? We wanted to know what kinds of problems big companies face when they try to maintain ever growing web sites. We’re about a third of the way through our survey, and we’ve discovered some very interesting things. For one thing, we assumed going into the project that bad links would be the number one problem out there. Although this is true for those companies with 2500 or more pages on their web sites, the number one problem faced by sites with 500 pages or less is stale content. An even bigger problem for companies with 500 pages or less on their web sites is a preponderance of stale content and bad links.

At first blush, these observations suggest that many companies in the Fortune 1000 have some kind of system or procedure in place to help them create and maintain their web site content, but that smaller web sites are still getting short shrift. In fact, if you look at the data closely, the percentages for bad urls and stale content look similar for web sites under 500 pages and over 4000 pages. The very largest and smallest web sites seem to face the same problems–entropy. Those web sites in the middle, although far from having a handle on the situation, seem to be coping better.

What else jumps out? Not as many companies as you think are using key organizational labels like “about us” or “contact us” for their sites. Only 144 of 350 surveyed sites so far are using “about” or “about us” in their linking. Only 184 of 350 surveyed sites are using “contact” or “contact us”. Who’s running site maps? 98 web sites are, which means that roughly two-thirds of the list isn’t using some kind of site map to help orient visitors. These numbers suggest that companies have a long way to go to standardize on common linking strategies that most people rely on to navigate a site.

Out of 350 companies surveyed so far, 158 are using either JSP, PHP, or ASP on some of their pages, with the overwhelming majority (132) opting for ASP. This matches another report I read that Fortune 1000 companies tend to go with Microsoft environments because they can afford the licensing–smaller companies (and by that I mean several hundred million in revenue and below) are a more even mix of web server environments. Fifteen companies so far have opted to use two or three of these technologies on the same site, which points out that in some industries, heterogeneous systems are the norm.

Want to know more? Tune in soon when we’ve had a chance to complete our survey and draw out some more interesting connections and factoids.

Bookmark:

Tags: No Comments