States of Jersey, which undertakes the government and administration of the British island of Jersey, has taken the No. 1 position for the first time in the latest Sitemorse UK Local Government quarterly INDEX.

Full INDEX is available at http://www.sitemorse.com/news/2015/8/24/2015-q3uk-local-government-web-benchmark-reigate-and-banstead-rises-271/

The Q3 INDEX, which assessed 424 Local Government departments, saw the States of Jersey move up 8 places from the previous Q2 INDEX and beat off competition from 2nd placed Enfield and from North Devon and Cornwall who finished 3rd and 4th respectively.

Reaching the top spot did not happen by chance! States of Jersey web service team have strived to become the best and were spurred on through a combination of reasons; a relentless focus on creating good online customer service for their 10,000 page website www.gov.je; gaining valuable customer feedback through their website over the past 10 months and a strong commitment to the e-government programme.

The outcome of all their hard work has been to achieve an overall top ranking INDEX of 9.34 after Sitemorse assessed their online services for function, accessibility, code quality, performance, email and metadata. Although they plan not to stop there and want to turn some of the 9 scores into 10s.

According to Marcus Ferbrache, who leads the web services team for States of Jersey, “It has been an ambition of mine to top the table stretching back nearly three years.”

He said their core aim was to make their online investment considerably better than traditional routes of contact such as by telephone and visiting their offices.

“We hope that people find the self-service approach of finding information they need on gov.je quicker and more convenient than contacting a States department directly. We know people get frustrated if things don’t work as they should, so we take quality seriously “, he exclaimed.

Adding: “Gov.je is a big web site, with over 10,000 pages, which makes it difficult to spot any problems like broken links, or pages that might not display properly on different devices. We rely on Sitemorse to regularly scan the site and automatically alert us to problems. This accolade reflects the efforts of our content and technical teams as we strive to continually improve the quality of the gov.je site.”

The full results and access to the Sitemorse INDEX, 2015 Q3/Local Government is available at: http://www.sitemorse.com/rt/1141 

Sitemorse INDEX
Sitemorse views online services, mapping out every combination of every one of the top 125 pages and completing around 1,200 assessments across User Experience (UX), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Search Capability (SEO). Against the results, our benchmarking methodology is applied to provide a ranked table - the results are then published as the "UK Local Government" INDEX.

About Sitemorse
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