Helping UK local authorities to be; Better Connected; - 12 years on..

20 Feb 2014

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It’s now twelve years since Sitemorse began working with Socitm, the organisation for IT professionals working in local government, an important partnership that feeds key data into Socitm's 'Better Connected' annual survey of all UK council websites.

The purpose of Better Connected is to identify good practice in the development of local authority websites based on extensive evidence-based research.

“There’s no question that Socitm's influence over the last one and a half decades has seen a general improvement in the websites of local government” commented Sitemorse CEO, Lawrence Shaw. “The input from Sitemorse helps the councils to improve their own performance and to see how they compare to their peers in the crucial area of web governance.”

The latest report – available to subscribers in the local government sector in the first week of March - with be Socitm’s 16th annual survey, and a team of reviewers have carried out a structured survey with 224 questions for local authority websites, followed by four shorter surveys on specific topics.

This research has been supplemented by seven additional sets of data, one of which is detailed technical data on the performance of each local authority site supplied by Sitemorse.

“Our survey is now in its sixteenth year and has been supported by Sitemorse for twelve of those years. In the time we have been working with them, Sitemorse has become a very recognised provider of 'web confidence', and it's great to be supported by their unique capability" Martin Greenwood, Insight Programme Manager of Socitm told us.

“It’s important if you are running a site to keep your eye on the ball when it comes to technical quality, because it definitely have a big effect on the user experience of the site” he added.

This year the Better Connected survey will, among other criteria, assess the experience of mobile users against desktop users for each council involved in the testing.

The latest Sitemorse Index of the UK local government sector will be published on 6 March. Our benchmark survey will look at the performance of more than 400 local authority websites across key criteria including function, code quality, and accessibility.