eValid™ -- Automated Web Quality Solution Browser-Based, Client-Side, Functional Testing & Validation, Load & Performance Tuning, Page Timing, Website Analysis, and Rich Internet Application Monitoring.

Summary
How do the WebSites of the Top 10 Commercial Banks within the Fortune 500 compare in terms of Best Online Experience?

Goals
For this comparative analysis of websites we define two important dimensions that allow us to rank order each website in terms of Best Online Experience:

• Ease of Navigation. This factor is a combination of the average rate of download of pages and the number of successful page retrievals. A high score for ease of navigation means that users will have quick responses as they work on the website, and that they will find very few broken or unavailable pages.
• Quality of Maintenance. This factor is based on the relative age of pages found on the website. A well-maintained website has very-current information, and indicates that great care has been taken to assure the quality of the information.

We used the eValid website analysis engine, programmed (see below) to collect specific metrics that contribute to these factors. To assure accuracy the measurements were done over a short time frame and using identical access capabilities.

Results
The technical measurements we made of the websites of the largest 10 of the Fortune 500 Companies [as of 15 March 2003; these have recently changed slightly]. The analyses led to the following Best Online Experience comparison chart.

The best-performing websites are in the upper right of the chart, and the worst-performing websites are in the lower left of the chart.

Individual Summary Results
The table below shows all of the results used to construct the comparative chart. Click to see the eValid Summary Report with the raw data. Click to see the 3D-SiteMap for each WebSite. Here are Animations and Usage Instructions for the 3D-SiteMaps. Right-click anywhere on any 3D-SiteMap for documentation. Here are some Usage Hints if you want to dig deeper in the 3D-SiteMaps.

#	Company	Click For Summary Report	Comments	Click For SiteMap	Comments
1	Bank of America Corp. ($53B) www.bankofamerica.com	eValid Report	C+: Large (over 5000 links), very quick but not particularly current and with a large number of broken/unavailable links.		A: This structure is conventional, good spread, only a few backward links.
2	Bank One Corp. ($25B) www.bankone.com	eValid Report	A+: A relatively smaller site, less than 500 pages, but quick and well maintained with good connectivity.		C+: Too many layers from the base URL, too many backward links.
3	FleetBoston ($19B) www.fleetboston.com	eValid Report	A: With about 700 pages and 4100 links, this website appears to be optimum in size, is very clean and very fast.		B+: Clean and simple, but some backward links. Reasonably good spread out between layers.
4	J.P. Morgan Chase ($50B) www.jpmorganchase.com	eValid Report	B+: Compact, self contained, relatively slower site with very few problem pages and very good currency and connectivity.		B: Small and clean organization but the two levels from the top hint at conflicts.
5	MBNA ($10B) www.mbna.com	eValid Report	A: A compact site with over 700 pages and only 1405 links, quite quick, but not as well maintained as some.		B+: Clean organization, but perhaps too deep, a few reverse links, none broken in the top layers.
6	National City Corp. ($9B) www.nationalcity.com	eValid Report	A+: Very large (over 5000 links) but very clean, well maintained, and very fast.		A+: Very clean, very direct, good spread.
7	SunTrust Banks ($B) www.suntrust.com	eValid Report	B: A very large website (over 5000 links), relatively clean and with good connectivity. Well maintained but slow.		A-: Only two reverse links, and a single shallow layer, which may be overly complex.
8	U.S. Bancorp ($16B) www.usbank.com	eValid Report	A+: Large (over 5000 links), relatively clean, and the fastest of the websites in this group.		B: Good spread, but too many layers, too many backward links.
9	Wachovia Corp.($22B) www.wachovia.com	eValid Report	A: Very large site (over 5000 links), quick and very well maintained but with a few broken/unavailable links.		B-: Confused dependence from the base URL, too many layers, too many backward links.
10	Wells Fargo ($27B) www.wellsfargo.com	eValid Report	C: Very large (over 5000 links) website, good connectivity between pages, very clean but the slowest of the group.		A: Narrow and deep, with a lot of links on the 2nd layer.

Methodology
To collect the data used in the chart we used the eValid website analysis engine with parameter settings as follows:

• Search Mode. We used the HTTP Normal mode which scans pages in the background without using the cache (all pages are freshly downloaded).
• Depth of Search. All of these tests were done with a maximum tree depth of 3. Most of these websites are many layers deeper.
• Large Page Threshold. We chose a relatively small 10 KByte limit for this factor because user response is usually best when the total page size is small. 10 KBytes @ 5 KBytes/second = 2.0 secs.
• Slow Page Threshold. We chose a 2.0 sec threshold to decide if a page was slow loading.
• Old Page Threshold. Here we chose a threshold of 1 day (24 hrs) to emphasize the stability of the site.
• Broken/Unavailable Link Counts. This factor is expressed as a percentage of the total number of URLs visited.
• Excluded URLs. To make sure that the report was not biased by the existence of long and very-long files -- PDF format files, for example -- these suffixes and a similar set were blocked from consideration.
• Mapped Links Limit. Because these corporate websites tend to be very large we imposed a 5000-link limit in each run. This limit means that eValid maps only the URLs that give rise to the first 5000 links. After the limit is reached eValid continues to search out properties of the already-enumerated URLs that gave rise to those links.
• 3D-SiteMap Limit. For simplicity the 3D-SiteMaps were made with depth 2, 1000-link limits, and don't include graphics URLs.

Web Access Details
All tests were done on a 384 Kbps (peak performance value) ADSL connection. The data was collected with successive eValid runs in a serial sequence during the normal business day.