Two of the United Kingdoms oldest banks joined forces to form Lloyds TSB. The original Lloyds Bank dates back to 1765 while the Trust Savings Bank Association (TSBA) was established in 1810. In 1995, the Lloyds Bank Group merged with the Trust Savings Bank (TSB) group to form the Lloyds TSB group plc. Both banking groups have encountered great success in meeting the banking needs of their clients over the last two centuries and continue to provide an outstanding banking service.

The last decade has seen compelling developments in information and communication technologies which have impacted greatly on the international banking industry. Widespread Internet usage and adoption has provided an opportunity for the establishment of online banking facilities. With their website in operation for a number of years Lloyds TSB enjoys a large portion of the UK’s Internet banking market share.

The Internet banking industry is growing rapidly. In 2007 the number of Internet banking users exceeded the number of telephone banking users. This was attributed largely to a rise in Internet literacy for the over 55's group who previously had showed signs of being hesitant to adopt Internet banking as a safe and legitimate means of banking. It is predicted that the number of Internet banking users will rise steadily over the next few years placing Internet marketing high on the agenda of corporate banking marketers worldwide.

Lloydstsb.co.uk uses a combination of white, blue and grey background colours with green and blue fonts. The general appearance is kept very clean creating a professional impression. The page permeates a serious air with just a touch of playfulness expressed through the use of cartoon images on the home page. I find the overall look and feel adequate and only slightly lacking in excitement.

The websites functionality cannot be faulted. All critical banking functions such as account logon’s, registration, and banking utilities have been included. Navigation is simple with logical formats and an easy to use linking structure. Added functions make navigating the website easy, they include an accessibility document, sitemap and a Lloyds TSB logo at the top left of the page which links back to the home page from anywhere in the site. Page lengths are short and include information panes to the left and top of each page for quicker navigation.

Security is a primary concern when it comes to Internet banking websites. The best performing online banking sites are those which take the greatest security precautions, have impeccable safety and security policies and belong to reputable banking institutions. Lloyds TSB meets all of the above requirements and a great deal of their online success can be attributed to their diligence in this regard.

An impressive added feature of Lloydstsb.co.uk is the interactive banking demonstration. This fun, educational tool is very effective. The site would perform better if it employed more innovative, interactive widgets and tools for their user’s convenience.

Lloyds TSB does not employ many of the popular Internet marketing techniques. There are many opportunities for the provision of information in the form of articles, advice, forums and newsletters. This would also beef up content increasing traffic to the website. The site could add a viral marketing component, allowing information to be passed on by means of e-mail forwarding. There are also opportunities for the use of affiliate marketing strategies. Although Lloydstsb.co.uk is functional, popular and well developed, one gets the feeling that their focus is on providing Internet banking facilities to existing clients and not really on using their website as a marketing tool to attract new business.

Lloydstsb.co.uk loads quickly. With no heavy graphics files to slow the loading time, it loads at 14.32 seconds, faster than 66% of all websites. The site contains no broken links and no HTML errors. Although the Lloyds website performs very well, ranking first for certain keywords, keyword density for words such as banking, internet and online are each below optimum threshold and could be improved. There are approximately 757 inbound links to Lloydstsb.co.uk. These include some rather valuable links from authoritative websites such as Wikipedia, BBC News, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo Business. Inbound links from authoritative websites improve link popularity and search engines visibility.

Lloydstsb.co.uk ranks in the top 50 on leading search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. Their Alexa traffic rank is 1,874, an impressive ranking which indicates that the site receives a high volume of traffic. They rank fourth in terms of traffic and link popularity under the category of regional bank sites in the United Kingdom. Competitors exceed their performance only slightly, it would thus take little effort to get ahead of the game seeing as their Alexa ranking is on par with their closest competitors.