What is this?

We've compiled a league table of County Sports Partnerships websites, rating each website out of ten.

Scores are calculated automatically by a computer (using Sitescore Enterprise), so no human judgement goes into the tests.

What do the scores mean?

Each site is scored for the following:

  • Popularity Rank
    The world ranking for this website - e.g. 100 would mean it is the 100th most popular website in the world.
  • Accessibility Score
    How accessible the website is to users with disabilities (particularly those with visual impairments).
  • Search Score
    How optimised this website is for search engines. Well optimised sites will tend to appear higher in Google and other search engines for valuable terns.
  • Quality
    The general quality of the website build, e.g. whether the website is compliant to various standards, correctly spelt, has no broken links, is well written etc.
  • Overall score
    Summary score out of 10 for the entire website.

Scores range from 1 - 10,

How does Popularity rank work?

We use Alexa to measure the relative popularity of websites worldwide. Alexa measures a significant sample of web users behaviour through toolbars to identify their relative popularity.

There are two important limitations:

  • Alexa can only measure traffic to an entire domain name (e.g. www.yourdomainname.com). It can't work out sites that are part of a larger domain - in these cases you'll see "Part of a larger site" in the report
  • Websites that are outside of the top 6 million or so most popular are visited so rarely it is impossible to measure them accurately. We therefore cannot display a rank for these websites.

Alexa is not 100% accurate but does provide a very good yardstick for relative comparison. Results are most accurate the higher your rank.

How do the Scores work?

The scores are based on a range of over 30 tests, which cover things like:

  • Spelling
  • Readability (how easy your text is to read)
  • Speed of your pages
  • Quality of your code" Compliance (especially for Disability Discrimination Act)
  • Search engine placement

The Accessibility, Search and Quality scores are based on averages of these representative tests. There are special rules which may increase or decrease a score further, if special conditions are met (e.g. a site which only has one page will score much lower, as it is usually broken or inaccessible).

The tests are conducted by Sitescore Enterprise, a commercial tool used for analysing websites.

Is this rigged?

It is clear that our own websites score very highly in this league table (e.g. Derbyshire Sport, Northamptonshire Sport, GreaterSport). We've intentionally developed our own websites to score highly for these criteria, but we haven't changed the tests to match our own sites. Essentially we use these tests for our own quality control.

The tests themselves were independently developed and are currently used commercially by several FORTUNE 100 companies in many different countries.

How do I improve my score?

We actively encourage others to improve their sites and score highly. Here are a few tips:

  • Use well written textual content
    There should be a reasonable volume of text, correctly spelt, and relatively easy to read. We test readability using the industry standard Gunning Fog and Fletch-Kincaid tests, which you'll also find in Microsoft Word.
  • Become W3C compliant
    Wherever possible, make your pages W3C compliant (this is a public standard governing the quality of code which goes into a website). There is a specific test for this, but you'll also benefit other tests which use overlapping criteria (such as checks for Alternative text, Headings and quality of HTML).
  • Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
    Pages written using CSS are generally more compliant, faster and accessible. Achieving this one step usually improves a score quite significantly.
  • Add graphical variety
    Sparing use of appropriate imagery can add interest to a website and increase your score. Generally a unique image every page is ideal.

I'd like to add / update a website

You can request a new website is added to the league table. Our only restriction at the moment is that we're only testing sporting websites, but later on we may categorise these further (e.g. Governing Bodies, CSPs, SSPs etc).

We'll automatically re-run the league table on a regular basis, so there is no need to ask us to re-run the tests for a particular website.