A survey of local council websites I have carried out finds that none of them manage to get two basic things right.
There are 1,001 different ways of judging the quality of your local council’s website, but increasingly I find there are just two, very simple, questions to ask which not only reveal an awful lot about the overall quality of the site (because I’ve yet to see a bad site which scores two ‘yes’ answers) but also in themselves are a key part of what a council should be doing online.
Does the website ask for your email address in a prominent way?
It’s unusual for a politician’s website not to ask for your email address on the front page, but it’s a rarity for a council website to ask for it.
Now if a council already has email addresses for most of its residents and anyway finds communicating with them by other means so easy that it doesn’t need to use email, then of course there’s no need to push email address collection through the website.
But back in the real world … many councils which spend millions each year on trying to communicate with residents have only extremely crude and hobbled email plans – starting with a failure to gather in email addresses through their website.
Does the website have an RSS feed?
Back in the 1990s, the idea of websites was that you put your content on them and tried to get people to come to them. But in the modern world, you have to take your content to where people are. Make it easy to share, pass on, republish etc and you’ll find far more people reading your content than if you insist on them coming to your site.
And the easiest way of sharing? By providing an RSS feed. Unless you’ve got a very strange back end system it’s not that challenging to produce a basic RSS feed.* Do that, though, and all sorts of opportunities open up, not just for individuals to subscribe but for other local sites to start republishing content.
How do council websites perform?
I’ve done a quick survey of 20 council websites, randomly selected from the list on Directgov.
Percentage of councils with an email sign up prompt on front page: 0%
Percentage of councils with an RSS feed: 40%
That’s a pretty damning set of figures (and far worse than I’d expected).
What does this say about website suppliers?
If a council’s website is not up to scratch, clearly in the end the councillors are responsible for this. But what also struck me in my survey was that many of the sites without RSS appeared to have been produced recently and with the help of an outside supplier.
In each of those cases was the outside supplier really keen on providing RSS but stymied by the council? I suspect the answer is ‘no’ – and that whilst my quick survey doesn’t paint a pretty picture of council websites, it’s also a pretty damning indictment of some of the website suppliers out there too.
Regardless though, if your council doesn’t match up to these two tests then – whether you are a councillor or not – why not contact the council and ask why?
In the case of the questions I’ve asked over the years, I’ve often ended up with a positive response and progress of some sort. Indeed, with the number of different issues that councillors have to know about and the fact that most are of the ‘pre-internet’ generation, I think quite a few are grateful if someone (politely!) provides them with some expert knowledge which they weren’t previously aware of. So ask and lobby away…
* And before Martin Tod comes along, yes – it’s true there is one small RSS feed out there which I still hand write. But that’s because it’s good to keep your hand in with the detail of coding. Or something like that 
18 Comments
My experience of council websites is that because most officers don’t know enough they end up aping another council’s site – good or bad – as long as the back end makes their life easy. Only after all that do they look at user experience and easy of finding the information. It has become a lowest common denominator situation. The are becoming more alike all the time but innovation is being crushed. SOCITM and others need to address this failing.
You still hand write(!) an RSS feed! Where? Why? I’m traumatised.
Remedial PHP programming course available on request to give you the skills to automate this…
Special (higher) rates for corporate PR people!
Agreed on the rss front. We had high hopes for this page: http://www.stroudgreen.org/politics until we actually went looking for the relevant rss feeds.
They forget how human beings use websites, they ignore feedback and they do not use plain English… Oh I remember they are in Local Government, that is normal!
Suggest you take a look at Mash The State.
Andy: Islington have said they’re will (almost certainly) add RSS when they update their website over the summer. I agree that the Stroud Green site is a good example of the power of making content available for other people to republish.
I don’t want an RSS feed, I want to know when my bins will be collected over Easter, and that sort of thing.
I agree Tim that what people want is a service, not a technology for its own sake. But good email communications means people get that information in their inbox. And providing bin news via RSS means people can sign up for the news and have it pop up in their news reader and for other local sites to be able to take and republish the information easily and automatically. So, for example, if you visit the website for a local residents’ association, you see the latest bin collection information there. Obsessing about technology for its own sake is wrong, but so is dismissing technology just for being technology.
I definitely don’t want an email prompt – I want easy access to key information, and not some annoying registration process, and a subsequent flood of council spam. I don’t think most ordinary people care about RSS either. It should be just a decent, fool-proof website.
David: that comment could be straight from an council IT department
Email sign ups don’t have to annoying and they don’t have to be for a flood of spam. Saying “it could be done badly” isn’t a great reasons for saying “don’t bother doing it at all”.
On RSS, one of the benefits of having an RSS feed is that it makes it easy for other sites to republish stories from the council site. That gets those stories out to a much wider audience (and that wider audience needn’t know anything about what RSS is). Saying most ordinary people don’t care about RSS overlooks that very important role. I did of course explain that in the original post
so I’m curious why you’re so dismissive of the point? Do you really think councils should have sites that make it very difficult for anyone else to further publicise their content?
>My experience of council websites is that because most officers don’t know enough they end up aping another council’s site – good or bad – as long as the back end makes their life easy.
That’s not fair. Experience of “council websites” is not data from which you can draw conclusions about the officers who did not design them.
Most “council officers” have no input into website design. How could they?
(Mark: how many Lib Dem members have input into the Party Website?
Having edited Council Websites, the main problems tend to be:
a) How do you deliver up to 800 diverse services, which may involve hundreds of different accessing forms, from an organisation of up 10,000+ people and keep it simple and coherent, maintained by a contributor team that may involve hundreds – co-ordinated by a web team that may be dozens.
A nightmare in a tiny council, never mind eg., Birmingham.
b) As with everything else, the rate of change and timescales that do not permit proper and planned evolution.
One example: When DirectGov first arrived, the demands for data to populate it were sent to Councils from the Govt at a few weeks’ notice with deadlines almost identical to those for the end of a key stage of the E-Gov programme. The data about hundreds of services was demanded to be delivered by (IIRC) 13th December, while the other had had staff working *way* beyond the call of duty for several years.
How sensible was that?
Ask anyone who was involved. It is a hugely diffiuclt job and I feel for them.
Mark, the things you outlined are the least of my concerns both as a council tax payer and an IT expert.
My County (Lib Dem) Council has a huge sprawling un-navigable website – but to make matters worse, it requires Inept Exploiter to apply for jobs online (what f*ckmuppet idiot would ever consider activex for clientside validation) and has been exploited by various SQL Server worms so that people using it with IE were open to hostile code installing malware on their systems.
I complained several years ago about being unable to apply for a job online and nothing ever happened.
You know what would be really good – if we had national local governence strategies and policies – every local government of every party seems to have completely different ideas of how to solve the same problems, with widely varying results regardless of party. From the perspective of a party member and council tax payer / services user it’s really disappointing that a party that should be prepared to govern the country (in the unlikely event of winning a parliamentary majority) can’t even organise coherent policy amongst even a handful of flagship councils.
Mark says: ” Email sign ups don’t have to annoying and they don’t have to be for a flood of spam.” I always find email sign-ups annoying: that’s just my opinion. And RSS is for news isn’t it? I don’t want to read my council’s press releases – I just want to work out how to access services, check planning apps, or pay bills. Why would the council need my email for that?
Anyway, I have to say that my council’s website is much, much better than the Lib Dem website, which has now not been updated for a whole week.
My councils RSS feed is a mixed bag. They do provide service information, but too often they provide politicised commentary representing the ‘official’ view.
I’d be happy if they stuck to increasing accessibility, but they get involved in self-promotion as though there is somehow no difference between the interests of the state and society.
RSS doesn’t have to be for ‘news’. For example, as you mention planning applications, your council could have an RSS feed for planning applications or (more usefully in most circumstances I suspect) one feed per ward or similar geographic area.
Re party website – there’s been plenty of content added in the last week, such as http://www.libdems.org.uk/media_centre/new-nuclear-power-stations-a-colossal-mistake-hughes-231183401 and http://www.libdems.org.uk/media_centre/nhs-charged-£81m-in-interest-by-government-lamb-231112119
I suspect you mean the list of stories on the front page with your comment, in which case the answer is (I believe) that the press team want to continue highlighting those stories rather than others.
Do the press team really want to highlight a story about anaphylactic shock statistics for a whole week? I think there must be a mistake or technical glitch. On a slightly different point, it could well be the only political website in the UK with no mention of the McBride scandal. Very odd.
Here’s what I wrote about council websites last year:
http://stubblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/councils-should-concentrate-on-providing-data-not-services-on-their-websites/
but it’s not just the council websites themselves, the local events site, fed by data from the council doesn’t provide an iCal feed of events, and while it looks pretty and seems well designed they even ask your email address front and central, they seem stuck in the 90s when it comes to how the web works.
Kingston’s website has an email signup on the home page – and guess who made sure it was there?
And it also lets you enter your postcode to see your bin collection day this week, or any planning applications nearby, or who your councillors are, or when your street will be cleaned…
But I have to admit that it lacks RSS feeds so that prompted me to send off an email to ask why.
So stop moaning and communicate (as in email…) with your Council’s webmaster.