Last February I wrote about Nokia’s site chosen as “Best Web Page in Finland“.
I was skeptical then and I’m skeptical now as the same media, Digitoday, publishes almost the same piece of news. Except that the company who did the research is different.
(Article from other source in English)
At march it was Webmark who did the research, now it’s Blue White Partners.
Anyhoo.
Article (in Finnish) claims that “Blue White Partners went through over thousand Finnish corporate web sites evaluating their marketing efficiency“. Jolly good.
Marketing efficiency?
Over thousand corporate web sites?
Hmm.
Well, as I last time learned, our journalists can be quite busy sometimes. So off to BW Partners we go to find the press release!
And yes, there it is ( press release as .pdf)
Whee, this is nice.
According to press release, methodology of the said research is based on “an average efficiency to attract visitors and turn them into customers, based on hundreds of thousands web sites evaluated“.
Errm, what?
And how the hell does one measure that?
And hundreds of thousands web sites evaluated?
Hmm.
Hey, there’s even more!
Again the Press Release states that “the average Blue White Score for Finnish Companies” (sic!) ” is 42, still below the international average of 50″. Now, Nokia, the front-seat student of all Finnish web sites, scores 99,8 and release states “which means that only 0,2 % of companies worldwide have as good or better web site as Nokia“.
Phee.
It seems that the rating goes from 0 to 100, 0 being the lowest score and 100 the highest. 100 obviously means “The Best”, there is no better and 0 that there is no worse site. (Please do correct me about the rating if I’m wrong)
The top-100 list for Finnish companies can be viewed at BW Partners Web site. All sites, listed in order of ranking, followed by score and change since the last evaluation.
(Small side note: depending on source about 8 % of (Finnish) men are red-green colour blind. If someone wants to indicate something, let’s take change, with colours, do use some other colours than red and green. Or better, don’t use colours alone, use something else. Like a minus-sign in front of negative changes?)
Anyhow, forward.
What’s nice is that I can purchase the evaluation report for only 295 eur!
Pretty cheap, isn’t it?
Conclusion and remarks
As such the evaluation portrayed here is worthless (at least to me). I don’t know the methodology, I don’t know the sample and so on.
Perhaps they’ll tell in the 295eur-report the following facts left missing in the press release and articles:
- Exact size of the sample (“over thousand” is not that exact, you know. 1001 is over thousand, isn’t it?)
- Methods of evaluation (“average efficiency to attract visitors ” and so forth is not that convincing)
- Sites Sampled (“over thousand Finnish corporate web sites” doesn’t tell that much.)
- Pages Sampled from every site or the algorithm for selecting the sample (did they evaluate only the front page or what? Did they start from the root and continue to leafs?)
Most likely the evaluation will be covered heavily by Finnish media, which is somehow sad.
Still waiting for the first proper “Best Web Site in Finland” evaluation.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
(Usual disclaimers apply; I do realize that evaluation methodology can be a trade secret, as well as other data. I also realize that business is business and everyone must make a living. )
[Edit 15.45, Arctic Startup has written about the first evaluation done by BW Partners. According to linked article the evaluation score is "is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media."]
Especially the orange compared to new blueish theme is somehow annoying in the old version,
