Even disregarding all the accessibility issues - which you have covered extremely well (as usual) - the whole thing just seems so subjective.

We’ve been awarded the bottom one… Content or whatever it is this year… which is fair enough - until you look at the actual results.

We actually picked up more points than a few sites that were awarded Transactional, never mind scoring three times scores in other areas than most of the other Content sites.

The one thing that really annoyed us was that we were actually singled out for Best Practice for transactions!

We seem to have missed out

(a) because our server and CMS were having issues during the review (typical, we can’t complain really - but it’s so annoying!),
(b) because our externally provided search system crapped out once during a search.

That’s doubly annoying because we share the exact same search with all of the other districts in Cheshire plus the County… The County got a tick for good use of search but none of the districts did - despite us all using the exact same service! (We always advised against it in the first place….)

The reviewers comments seemed to be full of very strange remarks too. I could go through them, but I’ve already written too much, I’ll just say they made some odd, very subjective observations, and it seems to have been based on these that we have missed out on Transactional.

It’s just so annoying when you have bent over backwards to try and comply with what they want, only to be told it’s all wrong and not good enough.

Especially as a few of our design decisions we made with their findings from last year in mind….

Grrr

Sorry for filling up the comments Jack, I’ll have a rant on my own blog when I get more details.