http://www.rentokil-initial.com
Rentokil Initial is one of the largest business services companies in the world, operating in the major economies of Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and Africa.
The company has some 90,000 employees providing a range of support services in over 40 countries where the ‘Rentokil’ and ‘Initial’ brands have come to represent consistent quality of service.
I worked on the Rentokil Initial site as a member of a 7 man team, working as a web developer and as senior web developer.
The current site is the 4th iteration of the corporate site and the first to incorporate web standards. The site is highly accessible and has moved from 80th to 4th 1st (see “This just in: Standards work!“) in the Sitemorse report for FTSE 100 sites.
Under Scrutiny
The Sitemorse report is a survey of all the FTSE 100 websites conducted as an independant consultancy. The results of the report are handed to the international press resulting in a large amount of good (or bad) publicity. For this reason, it is important for the corporate site to perform well in the survey. To do this, several criteria must be observed:
- The site must contain certain areas for specific users of the site. For example, an investors centre and a section on corporate social responsibility.
- The site must perform well in accessibility tests.
- The site must perform well in performance tests.
The first point boils down to well-planned content, however the second and third points were infinitely improved by employing web standards during the development process. Since the earlier iterations of the site contained the sections defined in point one, the sudden boost in performance in the Sitemorse report can only be attributed to that use of web standards.
Accessibility
Web accessibility is important on a corporate site. This does not just mean for disabled users - it’s important that the site is accessible by users across a wide number of platforms, not just PCs running IE6. It’s also important for reasons of search engine optimisation - search engine robots are probably the most important blind user a site will ever receive.
Although accessibility was infinitely improved with the use of web standards during the development process, we also chose to employ several techniques that would aid browsing further:
- Access keys: We chose to adopt several “access keys” to allow users access to certain key areas of the site quickly.
- Degradable Javascript Print Links: The site adopts some nice degrading javascript to place “print this page” links on the press releases.
