The Isle of Wight council’s Website has been given only one star in a nation-wide survey of Council Websites.
The survey, ‘Better connected 2012’ run by an association of ICT professionals working in Local Authorities called Socitm surveyed all 433 local authority websites evaluating them to establish how easy to use members of the public would find them.
A selection of most often used tasks including finding rubbish collection days, paying council tax, finding out school term dates are evaluated.
Scores are collated and sites are ranked from four stars to one star. The council dropped from a two star rating it had in 2011, to a single star, the lowest rating possible.
Communication department now run Website
The Comms department took over the organisation of the Website during a reorganisation last year.
We contacted them to ask for a reaction, but at the time of publishing, they’ve failed to respond.
More info: Socitm’s Better connected 2012. Thanks for Simon for the tip.
Update: 3.March.2012 This arrive from the council’s comms team the next day:
“The report was only received yesterday and we are currently reviewing the findings. We disagree with some of the assessments and we will be questioning those.
“We are already in the process of reviewing the site and other issues highlighted by SOCITM will be addressed as part of that process.
“While we would naturally have preferred a higher rating, we are heartened that we have risen from 13th to sixth highest site in the country in terms of our market share. We have around one million page visits per month which indicates that the public find the site useful. We hope this will continue when we launch the redesigned site in the coming months.
“Responsibility for site organisation has not changed. Staff from resident information and consultation work on maintaining and developing the site’s news section and also the Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as reviewing the editorial content created by service areas.”
