I was interested to see how Thanet and Kent's business websites stacked up so I took a few well known sites as control subjects and then added in local business websites that have all recently been recommended to me or known to me in some way. What I found was quite surprising.

To make things far I used as many metrics as possible to measure the success of the websites in terms of traction and penetration. the metrics I used were Alexa Rank, Google Page Rank, Google Back Links, Yahoo Back Links, Technorati (reactions, authority and rank) and Compete Rank. Each of these scores works differently for example with most of the rank based scores lower is better but a 0 is a total fail.

I chose Thanet Star (obviously) along with the TDC website, the Thanet Blog List and the website of a local photographer.  These would be my control entries against which we could measure the success of the websites in question.  What I did not expect was to have these sites dominate the results quite utterly.

I only wanted to use a smallish number of sites so I chose custwin.co.uk a business promotion business along with webdandy.co.uk and the first client they linked to afritrans.co.uk to compare with this I added webz4biz.biz who created the Thanet Business Network website. So I had two web designers and a client each. I added to this mix Boys and Maughan (local solicitors) and the Sure Start Millmead website (local non profit).

The resultant tables might surprise you.

This table contains the raw unprocessed data from my research and while easy for me to read it does not tell the average guy anything at all. So you might like to skip to the next table where things are boiled down to "brass tacks". Before we get there I want to say that I applied every global metric I knew but am happy to revise my figures if further global metrics can be found.

All tables are copied directly from a spreadsheet which I can email to you if you want it.

* High is bad, low is good and zero is a failure to even register (worse than very high).

This second table contains bidirectional percentage ranking.  That is to say that the values have been ranked from bad (0%) to good (100%) and then the "scores" have been added up.  Hopefully you can see what I saw above. While this smooths out a number of differences and hides some extremes it is nevertheless an easier set of numbers to read.

You can see that the control group are dominating the scores.  Notice that the two most impressive scores belong to blogs which are the only websites to make an impression on a number of metrics.  I was particularly supprised to find that thanetstar.com was the only site to show up on the marketting anaysis of compete which generally reflecs the Alexa rank quite closely.

Using the power of the spreedsheet I also generated a chart of which sites came top most frequestly.  Again the control group took the award.

What do these figures all mean though?

The Alexa and Compete ranks are indicators of the level of human visitors to the site.  As you can see these numbers are reduced due to the 0 Rankings in the sample set.  Even so it shows that the control group are getting the lions share of the visitors.  Both ranks are skewed slightly towards more technical and blog related websites which does nothing but credit for the visit rate of Thanet Council's offering which placed quite well in the grand scheme of things.

The Google Page Rank is a metric unto itself.  It is a logarythmic reprisentation of how important on a scale of 0 to 10 Google thinks a page is.  With all sites I looked up the main page as this is often the highest ranking.

Google Back Links is a filtered list of pages that Google feels offer quality links to the site in question.  Yahoo (Y BL) is less fussy and lists everything it found.  Here the TDC website had a huge bonus as yahoo also includes other pages from the site that link to the domain (all of them) and the TDC site is very large.

Technorati Reactions are a measure of the level of traction with home brew and social media.  It is simply a count of the number of mentions the site has had from blogs.  I expected the blogs to do better and they did.

Technorati's Authority metric and Rank are a measure of a blog's importance within the greater scheme of things.  From a business perspective this shows how well the site is engaging with home brew media.  Generally good scores here would indicuate a popular or active blog.  Again the blogs did far better here because of he inherent bias towards blogs.

Conclusions?

I want to be clear to the owners of the sites listed here.  I'm not trying to make anyone look bad or to be mean or anything else. I have simply reported numbers that were publiclly available and I have put them into tables.  Something any geek would do.I can and do advise on how to improve market penetration online and will be happy to provide my services to any local company.

Right that aside what are my conclusions?

It seems that if you want a nice pretty website then talk to a web designer but if you want to make that site do something then talk to a blogger.