Benchmarking A Sample Of UK Museum Web Sites

A benchmark of museum Web sites beginning with the letter A, and listed at the WWW Virtual Museum's list of Museum's around the UK on the Web.

The Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum Web site was found to be unavailable during the survey and so was discarded. This left 13 Web sites.

The following surveys were carried out:

• Analysis of Domain Names
• Analysis of 404 Error Pages
• Analysis of robots.txt File
• Analysis of Search Engines
• Analysis of Link Popularity
• Analysis of Search Engine Coverage
• Analysis of Accessibility of Entry Point
• Analysis of Compliance With Standards
• Analysis of Entry Point
• Analysis of Cachability of Entry Point
• Analysis of Relationships (and popularity and nos. of links)
• Analysis of Web Server Software

Domain Names

The domain names of the museum Web sites is summarised below.

Summary

• 11 museums (92%) have an entry point which is the domain name and 2 (8%) have an entry point which is one level beneath the domain name
• 6 (46%) have a .co.uk domain; 3 (23%) have a .org.uk domain; 1 (8%) have a .org domain; 2 (15%) have a .com domain; 1 (8%) have a .ac.uk domain
• 1 (8%) has a domain which is hosted by an ISP

Discussion

Most of the museums have a short, memorable URL for the entry points. This is very desirable for a variety of reasons (e.g. branding, ease of indexing, etc.) Different approaches are taken to the top level domain (.co.uk, .org.uk, .com and .ac.uk). This lack of consistency may cause some confusions for end users, although the confusion may be unavoidable if it reflects different funding streams, etc. However there is potential for the .museum top level domain. A more comprehensive survey of domain names may help in planning for deployment of use of the .museum domain.

404 Error Page

A summary of the 404 error pages provided by the Museum Web sites is given below.

Summary

• 10 museums (77%) still use the default server error message
• 3(23%) have a lightly branded error message

Discussion

The 404 page may be one of the most widely used page on an organisations Web site. It is therefore important to ensure that this page helps users with their navigation as, by accessing this page, they are lost. The page can provide access to a site map, a search facility and contact details. Branding of the 404 page can also support the organisation's visual identity.

It may also be desirable to provide a context sensitive error page. For example different error messages could be provided for users who go to a non-existent page directly (by typing in a URL), who follow an external link or who follow an internal link. Different error messages could also be provided for different parts of a Web site (e.g. www.council.gov.uk/museum/foo, www.council.gov.uk/library/foo and www.council.gov.uk/foo could have different error pages).

Providing a simple tailored 404 page is easy to implement and gives usability benefits.

For further information see the article on WebWatch: 404s - What's Missing? published in Ariadne issue 20 or as an example of a branded and functional 404 page see the Natural History Museum 404 page.

Robots.txt Page

The robots.txt file (located in the server root) was examined.

Summary

• 12 museums (92%) have no robots.txt file
• 1 museum (8%) has a robots.txt file

Discussion

The robots.txt file can be used to control indexing of your Web site by "robot" software. many people use this file to stop robots from indexing directories which are used for systems purposes (e.g. the /cgi-bin directory) or contain templates, images, etc. which need not be indexed by search engines such as AltaVista.

In addition you may wish to use the robots.txt file to prevent resources from being indexed because they are at a draft stage or it would not be appropriate for them to be indexed.

Search Engine

A summary of the search facility for the Web site is given below.

Summary

• 10 museums (77%) have no search facility.
• 3 museums (23%) have a search facility.

Link Popularity

The Linkpopularity Web site was used to report on the number of links to the Web sites.

Summary

• Most popular has 2,731 links.
• Least popular has 25 links.

Discussion

The presence of many links to a Web site can help to drive traffic to the site. In addition, citation based search engines (such as Google) will give a higher ranking to Web sites which have many links.

Search Engine Coverage

The AltaVista (US) search engine was used to report on the number of pages indexed.

Note that initially the AltaVista (UK) search engine was used. However shortly after this survey was completed the format of the AltaVista UK results was changed. AltaVista UK no longer gives a summary of the number of pages.

Summary

• The site with the most number of pages by AltaVista has 2,037 pages indexed.
• The site with the least number of pages by AltaVista has 0 pages indexed.

Discussion

It should not normally be possible to have more pages indexed than are present on the Web site, so the numbers given should reflect the sizes of the museum Web sites. However it is possibly for only parts of a Web site to be indexed, if technoligies which are not search engine friendly are used, such as frames, dynamic pages and splash screens. In addition use of the robots.txt file could ban robots from indexing the site.

Accessibility

The Bobby accessibility tool was used to report on the accessibility of the entry pages of the Web sites.

Summary

• Only one site had no Priority 1 errors.
• The largest entry point appeared to be 236.91 Kb - Aerospace Museum.
• The smallest site appeared to be 1 Kb - but this was the FRAMES page.
• The smallest site appears to be 15 Kb - Allhallows Museum.

Discussion

It should be noted that the Bobby service may not have analysed the user's view of sites which made use of frames or server redirects.

Compliance With Standards

The W3C HTML and CSS Validator and Link Checker were used to analyse the entry point of the Web sites.

Summary

• No site complied with the HTML 4 DTD.

Page Analysis

The NetMechanic Web service was used to analyse the entry point of the Web sites.

Summary

• The largest Web site appeared to be 237,107 b (231 Kb) - Aerospace Museum.
• The smallest Web site appeared to be 16,045 b (15.7 Kb) - Allhallows Museum.

Web Server Software

Netcraft was used to report on the Web server software used.

Summary

• 7 (54%) hosted on a Unix platform (4 on Linux, 2 on Solaris and 1 on BSD).
• 6 (46%) hosted on a Microsoft platform (4 on NT 4 or Windows 98, 2 on Windows 2000).

Cachability

The Cacheability Engine was used to see if the museum entry point can be cached.

Summary

• 11 appear to be cachable
• 2 appear not to be cachable

What's Related?

Netscape's What's Related Facility

Summary

• The most popular sites are Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology (in top 155,547 Web sites) and Althorp House (in top 256,619 Web sites).