Premiership websites: The good the bad and the ugly revealed

The new football season is under way and silicon.com can reveal the exclusive results of its first month's monitoring of Premiership football clubs' websites.

In association with web monitoring firm Keynote, silicon.com last season revealed that the star performers online, if not on the pitch, were unfashionable Everton (see http://www.silicon.com/a53248 for more).

The Toffees saw off the competition from bigger clubs to land silicon.com's inaugural title. Clearly bigger clubs were too busy splashing cash on exorbitant players' wages to bother spending on their official websites.

This year however it is Newcastle United who have started with a bang. Over the last month, their website has been accessible within an impressive 0.80 seconds.While the Toon army take top spot, Premiership big spenders Manchester United have managed to hit even lower levels than the 16th spot they finished in last year. The Red Devils are rock bottom of the table after the first month, with their dog of a site taking an appalling 6.94 seconds to download.

Other under performers occupying the relegation spots include Fulham (6.41 seconds) and Premiership new boys Birmingham (4.82). Further up the table, Manchester United's title rivals Arsenal and Liverpool are hardly setting the world alight early doors either. The Gunners managed a dismal 3.15 seconds while the Reds registered a marginally better 2.49 seconds.

Again it was down to the more unfancied teams to battle for top spot over the month. Last year's champions Everton are in sixth (1.57 seconds), while Charlton (1.40), Bolton (1.06) and Blackburn (0.93) are snapping at the Geordies' heels.

The full table looks like this:

1. Newcastle (0.80 seconds)
2. Blackburn (0.93)
3. Bolton (1.06)
4. Charlton (1.40)
5. Chelsea (1.56)
6. Everton (1.57)
7. Sunderland (1.68)
8. Leeds (1.98)
9. Southampton (2.14)
10. Manchester City (2.20)
11. Tottenham (2.48)
12. Liverpool (2.49)
13. West Brom (2.87)
14. West Ham (2.92)
15. Arsenal (3.15)
16. Aston Villa (4.32)
17. Middlesbrouh (4.73)
18. Birmingham (4.82)
19. Fulham (6.41)
20. Manchester United (6.94)

While the league measures performance in terms of time taken to access the sites, this year we will also be looking at availability. And here special mention must be made of Middlesbrough whose entire site was available for a staggeringly poor 25.91 per cent of the time.

Middlesbrough's poor performance can be partly explained by Keynote's methodology. Keynote is using transaction agents and content errors are systematically counted as page errors, which means that one missing object affects the availability figure. Therefore, if an image is missing for three weeks out of four (even a .gif), the overall reported availability will not be higher than 25 per cent.

According to Eric Nataf, European marketing director at Keynote, using transaction agents was the only way to measure all sites, using the same mechanics.

While the majority of clubs experienced no more than around two per cent downtime, only Chelsea, Fulham and Manchester United managed a top marks 100 per cent uptime.