<h2>Hi</h2>

Better connected 2012 - out now!

2 Mar 2012 02:04 PM

Congratulations to 23 councils that have achieved four stars for their websites in our annual survey, details of which are out now and available to download.

160 councils have achieved three stars, and overall, council websites have improved in the last year, with 42% of the total getting three or four stars, compared with 32% in 2011.

However, the Better connected 2012 report, that sets out findings from the survey of all 433 local authority websites, concludes that most council websites remain insufficiently focussed on the 'top tasks' that are of greatest interest to their customers.

This will inhibit the ability of council websites to deliver savings and efficiencies associated with channel shift, says the report, and also to meet customers' growing expectations of what service delivery online should be like.

The report says that in order to improve things, councils must change the way they govern and manage websites. Current arrangements can leave web teams struggling to balance different interests and unable to focus on the primary goal, which should be to provide quick and easy access to the most popular services.

Better connected 2012 (the Full Report) can be downloaded now by employees of Socitm Insight subscribing organisations who are registered on the Socitm website (registration is free and instant), along with a range of spreadsheets containing detailed results for every UK council.

An expanded version of all the results (the Full Results Report) will also be available from 15 March 2012, but only as an electronic version.

Non-subscribers will be able to buy a printed version of the Main Report (available from mid-March) at a cost of £495 (£475 for Socitm members in non-subscribing organisations).

The Better connected 2012 headline results data is available to all, free of charge under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence which allows sharing and reuse for non-commercial purposes. Go to www.socitm.net/betterconnected for further details.