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Summary
How do the websites of the 10 Top USA Ski Areas compare in terms of delivered Best Online Experience? For this comparison we chose two East-coast (Vermont), two West-coast (California), and six Colorado resorts (including three front-range, Vail, Brekenridge and Winter Park) and three Western-slope destination resorts (Crested Butte, Steamboat Springs and Snomass at Aspen).

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 made of the WebSites of 10 Top 10 USA Ski Areas produced the relative Quality of Online Experience comparison chart shown. For simplicity of comparison, all the data shown are all 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 3D-SiteMap	Comments
1	Aspen Skiing www.aspensnowmass.com	eValid Report	B: Huge site (over 5000 links), slow and clean enough relative to its size. Well maintained.		A+ Classic, easy to use structure with good spread and elaboration.
2	Breckenridge breckenridge.snow.com	eValid Report	A-: A large site, moderately quick. Well maintained.		A-: Classic structure, but too much dependence from a small number of pages.
3	Crested Butte www.cbmr.com	eValid Report	A+: Fastest, cleanest, but smallest WebSite in the group. Very new content. Very good look and feel.		A: Good spread, good connectivity, some backward links.
4	Heavenly www.skiheavenly.com	eValid Report	A: Large but not huge, rather messy but reasonably current.		B-: Good spread out, some backward connectivity, but some cross-level links.
5	Ski Steamboat www.steamboat.com	eValid Report	A: Fast, but compact WebSite with no broken/unavailable links, very well organized. Well maintained.		C: Strange structure from base, some backward links, "false base" page one layer down will confuse users.
6	Squaw www.squaw.com	eValid Report	A: Very large site, very fast, reasonably clean. Well maintained.		A-: Near classical structure, good elaboration from root node but some second-layer links.
7	Stowe www.stowe.com	eValid Report	C+: A small WebSite, relatively clean and fairly fast. Not very well maintained.		A: Very clean, simple structure, good elaboration, only one page below both the 1st and 2nd layer.
8	Stratton www.stratton.com	eValid Report	C: Very large (more than 5000 links), relatively messy and the slowest WebSite in this group. Well maintained.		C+: Good structure (most of the broken links are in the top layer), but several secondary base pages.
9	Vail vail.snow.com	eValid Report	A-: Very fast, very clean, super large site (well over 5000 links). Well maintained.		B-: good structure, but crinkled layering and too much linkage from some near-isolated nodes.
10	Winter Park www.skiwinterpark.com	eValid Report	B: Very large site (over 5000 links), very clean, but slow. Well maintained.		B-: Clean structure, but two apparently independent layers from the base.

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.