Cabinet Office
Why resource the website?
Your website is your electronic front desk. A poorly resourced website presents as bad an image of the local authority as poorly trained front desk staff. For customers to have a satisfactory experience online, local authority websites need to be developed based on citizen’s needs and preferences. To support this, the website will need to contain information that is useful to citizens, presented in a way that will help them with their enquiries, and which will enable them to transact business with local authorities. Local authorities will need to measure the success of their website through use of web performance management tools and/or customer surveys and/or user testing.
The strategy for using the website should be an integral part of a communications strategy for the local authority. In particular, the corporate communications strategy of the authority should be updated to reflect the maturity of the web as a mainstream communication channel, including measures of policy, performance and self-assessment in enabling interactions for electronic service delivery.
Resourcing should be part of an organisation-wide strategy. For example, training in web writing should be provided to those staff responsible for producing documents that will go online. As a consequence of their training, authors should be able to provide summary data and take responsibility for keeping information up to date. In this way, the documents they submit will require much less revision by the web team before being posted to the website.
Content management systems allow for the more efficient management and tracking of the flow of electronic content to a website. Such content management systems make it easier for people across the organisation to update their own pages.
Where are resources needed?It is important that citizens are able to easily access local authority websites, and not have to wade through a number of different domains to find the information that they want. If the local authority has decided to have more than one website or provide different types of services on a .com, .org.uk or another namespace other than .gov.uk, then, on the front page of each of its websites, the authority should place a clear link to a page that explains its domain name policy. This policy should be enforced consistently across the authority’s websites.
It will not help users find the information or services they need if authorities generate a number of sites, all with different names, each one relating to a different initiative or department. The more names an authority invents for its websites, the less its sites will be trusted by citizens and indeed less confident that the information they are obtaining is genuinely from a local government organisation.
The issuing of all .gov.uk domains names is controlled so as to create an orderly, reliable system of addresses. The not-for-profit company Nominet sets overall policy for all .uk domain names. Policy for the .gov.uk domain names is set by a Naming and Approvals Committee chaired by the Office the e-Envoy. This policy, is kept under review, is published as part of the Guidelines for UK Government websites and is available online from:
http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/domain.htm
The vision for local e-government is set by the national strategy for local e-government.
http://www.localegov.gov.uk [external link]
The Guidelines for UK government websites: Illustrated handbook for web management teams provides detailed advice on the following subjects at:
Illustrated handbook for web management teams
The Performance and Innovation Unit has published Privacy and data-sharing: the way forward for public services:
Privacy and Data–Sharing: The way forward for public services [external link]
Quality Briefings for UK Government Websites provide resourcing case studies. Web Quality Briefings 3 examines the resourcing of information publishing for a large government department. Web Quality Briefings 4 looks at the issues for a small government agency in making a business case for an online transaction: