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Summary
How do the websites of the Fortune 500 Hardware Manufactures 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 measurements we made of these websites 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	Apple Computer, Inc. www.apple.com	eValid Report	A: A relatively large site, very quick, moderate broken-link counts, and relatively smaller pages.		A-: Clean, well organized, some backward/reverse links, some direct access to bottom-most layers.
2	Dell www.dell.com	eValid Report	C: Very large site, moderate amount of broken links, fairly heavy with links.		B: Quite a few backward links, very large spread below topmost pages.
3	eMachines, Inc. www.emachines.com	eValid Report	A-: Moderate sized site, very fast, low broken-link count, very small and moderately linked pages.		B: For a large site, relatively little access from the root, some backward links.
4	Gateway Computers www.gateway.com	eValid Report	B: A large site, moderately speedy, relatively large pages, and very low broken-link count.		A: A few backward links from root, but very good access to multiple layers, great flexibility.
5	HP www.hp.com	eValid Report	A: Very large site, large number of broken links, lightly linked.		B+: Quite a few backward links, Good spread from the top downward.
6	IBM www.ibm.com	eValid Report	C: Large and relatively slow, high broken-link count, relatively larger pages.		A-: Good expansion from the main page, a few upward/backward links, lots of access from top.
7	MPC Computers, LLC. www.buympc.com	eValid Report	B: A large site, with superior broken-link count and high links/page count, but somewhat slow.		A-: Good spread and distribution of links, a few backward links. Comments...
8	Silicon Graphics, Inc. www.sgi.com	eValid Report	A+: A large site, very fast, high page size and high link count per page, and superior broken link scores.		A: Classical structure and organization, good multi-layer structure, a few backward going links.
9	Sony www.sony.com	eValid Report	A+: A smaller site that is moderately fast, with average linking structure and a moderate broken-link ratio.		A+: Near symmetrical 1st and 2nd layer, good expansion and good spread out.
10	Sun Microsystems www.sun.com	eValid Report	B: Large and relatively quick site, moderate broken-link count, few links/page.		B-: Very complex structure, moderate number of backward/upward links, uneven distribution to 2nd and 3rd layer pages.

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.