The number
of councils with transactional functions on their websites has
doubled since this time last year, according to a survey by council
IT managers’ group Socitm.
Councils offering
transactions on their website double from 60 in 2006 to 121 in
2007, Socitm found in its survey of 468 councils in November and
December last year.
London boroughs
were most likely to have transactional websites; 64% achieved this
status. Meanwhile, only 14% of Welsh unitaries authorities offered
transactional facilities on their websites.
Overall, Barking
& Dagenham came top in Socitm’s assessment of council websites,
which included critical such as useful content, usability, search
quality and accessibility.
There were around
15.1 million visitors to local authority websites in December 2006,
an increase of 27% compared to December 2005, the report Better
Connected 2007 found.
Martin Greenwood,
programme manager for Socitm Insight and author of the report, said
that although more sites were transactional, they still struggled
on usability.
“The report shows
that usability remains a key challenge - only one out of 121
transactional sites meets all five of our criteria for excellent
usability, whereas 21 do so for excellent content.”
Of the 168 sites
that have a registration process, only 19 were using an https
secure connection and were considered by reviewers to be well
presented. The report describes this finding as a “major
concern”.
More on the Socitm
survey:
http://www.socitm.gov.uk/socitm/Library/Better+connected+2007.htm
Councils will spend £600m less on ICT this year,
Socitm says
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