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 Fortune Magazine Top 10 Fastest Growing Small Companies Compared in terms of delivered 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 measurements we made of the websites of the Fortune Magazine Top 10 Fastest Growing Small Companies Compared produced the relative Quality of Online Experience comparison chart shown. The data shown are normalized relative values.

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	Asta Funding ($28.4 Million) www.astafunding.com	eValid Report	A+: A small website (135 pages), very quick and relatively well maintained.		C: Small website, too many broken links, too many backward links.
2	Catalyst Semiconductor ($47.5 Million) www.catsemi.com	eValid Report	B-: A very small website (70 pages), nothing broken, but not terribly quick.		A-: Very small site, normal spreadout, clean structure.
3	CompuDyne ($127.4 Million) www.compudyne.com	eValid Report	B-: One of the poorest scoring in terms of currency and quality, but reasonably quick.		B-: Normal structuring, four layers from the top, but with two layers of backward links. Too many broken links.
4	Dynacq International ($48.8 Million) www.dynacq.com	eValid Report	B+: A small, very fast and very clean and complete website.		A: Two layers from base URL, three layers backward. Normal elaboration and structure.
5	Evergreen Resources ($120.8 Million) www.evergreengas.com	eValid Report	B-: A very small website with some broken links, relatively older (stable) pages, and relatively quick.		A-: Good structure, but more depth than normal. No backward links.
6	Key Production ($108.9 Million) www.keyproduction.com	eValid Report	A+: This is a small website with good response times and relatively good maintenance.		B: Normal structuring, five layers from the top, two layers of backward links.
7	NYFIX ($41.4 Million) www.nyfix.com	eValid Report	A: A small, compact website that is fast and clean.		A-: Classic structure, good elaboration, but too many broken links and too many layers.
8	Quicksilver Resources ($143.1 Million) www.qrinc.com	eValid Report	B: A smaller, very current website, but relatively slow to respond.		A: Very small site, normal spreadout, clean structure. No backward links.
9	Zoll Medical ($124.0 Million) www.zoll.com	eValid Report	A: A larger website (over 5000 links, the limit for this study), very clean and quite speedy.		A+: Near-perfect structure, moderate fanout and no backward links.
10	4Kids Entertainment ($41.5 Million) www.4kidsent.com	eValid Report	B: A slightly larger website (250 pages) than the others, quick and quite clean.		A: Four layers from base URL, two layers up (back). Normal elaboration and structure.

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 during normal business hours.