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Council Websites The Good The Bad And The Need To Improve

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I have been spending some time recently looking at different council websites and the differences between them from the very good to the not so good.

The Good

I asked Twitter for examples of good council websites and got:

http://www.camden.gov.uk/

Beta 1.0 makes good use of pop up menus so you are not clicking through endless links to get to the information you want and a really nice menu of quick links for Pay Apply Book Locate & Request.

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/

Has a fantastic interactive map of services locations & transport on the front page.

http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/

Nice layout big images and a tabbed menu that allows lots of information to be easily accessible.

http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/

Next-door neighbor to Gateshead and again a very good site, the first one I have seen that has a very clear Accessibility link on the front page. I particularly liked this http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/core.nsf/a/worldrecordmattresses story, normally this would be reserved for the local paper, but the council have bought in to the idea and are promoting it.

http://www.lichfielddc.gov.uk

Nicely laid out site again and has the best accessibility options of all of the above. From a very plain link at the top of the home page you are taken to a settings page where you can alter the site to suit your individual needs. I also like the Fickr stream on the front page, this gives people a sense of belonging when they see their own images on the council website.

http://www.redbridge.gov.uk/

Another excellent site, what is really nice about this is the fact that you can add content to the site.

This is going someway to making the site a destination rather than a portal. The more often people visit your site and the longer they stay the better you can engage with them.

The Bad

I asked Twitter the same question about bad council websites and didn’t get much of a response, in retrospect I think it is fair to say that there are a lot of bad council sites out there and do we really need to be naming them and upsetting people?

The Need To Improve

Because Eric Pickles MP has told local councils that they should publish all spending over £500, more people are visiting the council sites as they crave the data, it is also making councils look at their own sites and some are realising how woefully inadequate they are, then remembering that they now have no money to create a new site.

I have been speaking to different people in councils and I have heard statements like, ‘we need to invest in new hardware at a cost of £150,000 before we can procure an new website and that will cost 100s of £1000s on top of that’

Most normal people with even a modicum of technical knowledge go WTF! at this point, what website needs hardware costing £150k? More importantly why do you want the hardware? Rent a server let someone else worry about managing it.

Do you really need to spend in the 100s of £1000s on council sites? BCCDIY cost £zero to create. Paul Hadley did some rough calculations that indicated BCCCDIY would have cost around £32,000 with an ongoing £500 per month cost. BCCDIY was created by people who had civic pride, skills and were thoroughly hacked off that Birmingham City Council had been promising a wondersite for years. When the ‘wondersite’ appeared it was massively over budget (final cost was quoted as £2.8m!) and to be honest was a bit crap. So Stef and friends created a new and far better (IMO) site to show what could be done. This was done without the support of the council and without funding.

The Unthinkable?

What would happen if a visionary council said, ‘OK we want a new site, we can’t afford to pay inflated market rates and get somewhat fleeced by the big development companies, how about we work with some local developers.’?

If this were ever to happen there need to be some ground rules around this for it to work.

  1. The council must support the developers, pay, desk / working space, food, beer.
  2. The council should (although not required) provide a development environment.
  3. The council must give the developers access to some information & data
  4. The council must not specify what they want
  5. The council must not take the proverbial

1 There are developers out there who code for fun, or for not a lot of money, coders know coders, coders like safety in number if they go out in daylight. If you get one you will more than likely find they will bring others with them. Offer some desk space and internet connectivity in return for them working on your social enterprise.

Give them food, £250 buys an awful lot of pizza and pop each week. offer to pay, not a salary but initially what about travel costs? Lets face it councils waste sums of money on some really strange things, so would an investment of £10,000 in a project like this really be that difficult if it gets you on the road to a new site?

2 If you could set up a development environment it would be really cool. You are a council, the chances are you have tons of unused IT kit lying around that could be utilised. It may not be easy to find but I bet it is there.

3 Ask the coders what they want data wise. Coders are geeks, if you offer parking data to a geek they will probably fall to the ground in a faint that would make Jane Austin proud. I’m not suggesting that you give total un restricted access to all council data. But give raw data sets out to people who want it, let them do ‘stuff’ with it, you may be surprised. If you are struggling on getting the data out of the system due to reticence of your staff, get the geeks to advise you. (I’ll let you in to a secret, we don’t really believe you when you say it will cost over £1000 to extract details of how many parking fines you have issued.)

4 You can’t specify what you want!* Counter intuitive I know but if you start off going down the whole LG procurement route you will not get anywhere because this project will more than likely fail at the first hurdle of not being part of your ‘Approved Supplier’ list. Or for that matter the second hurdle of your IT manager having (perceived) control of his empire prized from his cold dead hands. Or for that matter the legal services team, or pretty ,much anyone in local council who have been bred over many years to be risk averse.

*The only caveat to you can’t specify what you want is: the platform used by your now tame coders must be open source and not restricted by licenses and cost.

5 Be fair, you will be getting a good job done at better than market rates, don’t lose your new found credibility and kudos by taking the work and passing it off as your own or worse still giving it to a overpriced development company.

Now let the coders have at it.

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Mike Rawlins

I look after the technical side of things at Talk About Local.
Away from Talk About Local I take photos, fly my quadcopter and walk my two Beagles.
If I'm not doing any of the above then you'll find me volunteering at my local RNLI station as a press officer.
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Comments

  1. I must of missed your question on Twitter, I think you can image which council site I really don’t like, get on with, find easy to use, forgot there were local elections on this year…. and so on.

    Matt

  2. I think you make some very valid points, Mike, but I’m not convinced the BCCDIY approach is always the right one.

    The problem with so many sites is not just coding or the execution, but the design (IA, etc), UX and the content. You rightly point out there’s a lack of technical and web knowledge within councils – but it’s this lack of understanding that causes councils to overspend (an overcautious approach to risk plus a lack of knowledge about the alternatives, I guess).

    I agree all councils should try and involve their local web community, using local skills and knowledge where possible. But I’m not sure doing this through goodwill alone is a sustainable model – unless they have the skills in-house to maintain the site, there’s a risk it will wither once those involve have moved on. And in my experience, the knowledge gap in councils is so great they simply don’t understand the technologies enough to meaningfully engage with their local developer community. That’s why they buy in expertise, and that expertise so frequently takes them for a ride.

    The BCCDIY approach can work well for content-based sites, but council sites are increasingly transactional too. Obligations to safeguard cutsomer data and comply with the over-restrictive Government Connect also make the collaborative approach to website building difficult.

    What councils need, I think, is a better understanding of the web in-house. If those buying in technologies actually understood them, they’d be less likely to pay over the odds for bad sites, and (I’d hope) be better able to engage with their local developer community.

  3. Sharon is quite right. If you don’t know what you’re looking at when you’re buying design then you’ll only get quality by chance. Understanding the intricacies of what makes a good website takes time and dedication at learning web design. You don’t get that just by using the web every day or being the manager responsible for installing the corporate network.

    What annoys me about this (quite frankly) is that it’s not that the money isn’t there. I was struck by two recent job ads for building public sector websites.

    One was with The Dextrous Web, an independent web agency building public sector work:

    http://thedextrousweb.com/2010/06/we-are-hiring-2/

    The other was at my local council:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/300783/JD%20Web%20Dev%20Officer%20-%20June%202010.pdf

    Which do you think is likely to get the better person? I’d be surprised if there was any significant difference in the salary and benefits.

    Yes, you need people that tick the right boxes in the raw technical skillset. But you also need people that are passionate about design generally and the public sector web mission in particular. If you don’t make that a requirement for the job, don’t be surprised when you hire tepid, indifferent staff and you end up with a third-rate website, no matter how much is done in-house or bought in from suppliers.

  4. After tweeting about this post on Twitter – @ukjeeper sent me a link to an article from 5th August about the Essex County Council website being quoted at a staggering £830k.

    As a web developer it is beyond me how any website can cost that much – especially for a council which is entering a job freeze and looking to make huge savings.

    The article can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/2akpo36

  5. This is an interesting topic for me particularly after recent events. I recently contacted my local council about their shiny new website – which looks great – about the possibility of me spending a few hours a week filling the completely empty news section for them free of charge.

    I thought it’d be a bit of fun getting involved in my local area and as an automotive journalist, a nice way to tackle a different type of writing.

    I received a short reply saying they’d be discussing the website shortly, and then quite short and uninterested replies to subsequent follow ups. It has now been six months and the news section remains empty. I’ve since moved on to other things, but it disappoints me to see a council with a complete lack of interest in what could be a very useful website.

  6. If a lot of councils are losing staff or freezing recruitment, then ideas like this will be the only possible way for them to improve their websites.

    Sharon is right that there are services involving payments or personal data that will need to be procured, but by letting go of control of much else, this spending could be better focussed. The biggest frustration for residents and the biggest missed opportunity for many councils is related to the content and information which goes onto sites that are ineffective to navigate and incomplete. For many places, the place and its council are effectively interchangeable, so there’s a massive benefit to getting residents, workers and visitors involved in creating the website, ideally alongside councillors and council officers as well.

    Mike has mainly focussed on coders and maybe they should be first in the queue for the pizza and biscuits, but not far behind should come people from the creative industries who can add local images, edit down horrible corporate text into something people understand and add videos of the area. Enable council workers and councillors, plus all the community bodies associated with councils like residents associations, to come into this social space and feed their profiles and updates into the site and you could get council websites that are energetic and rich in local content.

    It’s generous to say that people will show up to build for free, but it’s not just civic-mindedness. Through this sort of collaboration, people develop new skills and contacts and they get the chance to really showcase what they can do. As well as the site itself, there is scope to build tools and applications that are very useful to disconnected communities. Many councils have an economic development wing and this is an excellent chance for them to get to understand what their local industries are really capable of in order to market them more widely.

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