I recently read an article on The Register that revealed the UK World Heritage web site got only 77 hits in a year!
The information came to light after a series of questions tabled by Brent East MP Sarah Teather. This was picked up by the Guardian who ran the original story titled “The websites nobody wants” that paints a rather bleak landscape of the effectiveness of many UK Government sponsored web sites.
As you probably don’t know there are a quite a lot of World Heritage locations in the UK, 20+ in England alone – and the UK World Heritage web site would more accurately be called a portal (which is indeed what it refers to itself as) – providing links to specific web sites that deal with the individual locations (and that appear to be under seperate control).
Whilst the markup still relies on tables for layout (which is a big faux pas – especially for such simple sites), its real failing is a lot worse. If you visit the site without Javascript turned on, then you do not get to see any of the navigation! You can’t navigate to Map of sites across the UK nor can you report these problems to the DCMS team using their Contact page.
I don’t know if that is the real cause of their low page hit rate, but doing a simple search in Google to see how well they are indexed reveals that only two pages are indexed. The map page is linked (probably because another site links to it) and the initial front page but no other pages on the portal are indexed. No wonder nobody visits… nobody can find it!
Someone needs to tell them that the best way to optimise a site for search engines is to create a Standards Compliant and Accessible web site. Use a complete doctype and validate against it.
I’m available for consulting.