August's website rankings of 100 retailers' sites has put diy retailers among the worst performers.
A comprehensive list of 100 sites, which includes not only the largest players but also some of the smaller specialist online merchants, has been created by The Retail Bulletin, and website testing company SiteMorse.

SiteMorse used its own automated testing of the first 125 pages of each retailer's site to generate a ranked table.

This showed that only seven sites achieved what SiteMorse regards as a good score of seven out of 10.

Wine merchant Majestic scored 8.75 out of 10, followed by Morrisons, Tesco Direct and Next.

Diy retailers fared a lot worse.
Wickes scored 4.34 (with a ranking of 31); Focus DIY 3.09 (54th); Homebase 2.62 (62nd); Argos 2.42 (67th); Robert Dyas 2.27 (71st); and B&Q 1.25 (91st).

Screwfix's site was excluded from the ranking because it 'either was not available or it is reliant on 'assistive' technology, which SiteMorse believes breaks the general rules of accessibility of internet sites.'

General retailers Woolworths and John Lewis scored 4.60 and 4.44 and were ranked 27th and 28th respectively.

All sites were also marked on accessibility for the visually impaired. The top retailer, Majestic scored 0% while diy retailer, and the worst among its rivals, was Focus DIY with 97.66% pages failing.

Lawrence Shaw, founder of SiteMorse, said in general terms the retail sector falls short: "Only 25% of the 100 sites achieved more than a 50% score (five out of 10), which considering this is a sector that needs to get it right online is poor as it means 75% simply didn't do very well."