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The question in my title is of course a little provocative - who is to say whether a website is better or worse?
The answer, in my view, is our users.
For some reason in Australian we have never, to my knowledge, asked our citizens to compare government websites against universal categories such as awareness, ease of task completion, information depth and quality, findability, usability or design aesthetics.
There are few objective standards or comparison processes in use in government - although Global Reviews has a good stab at rating local council sites. Having worked with them before, their methodology is robust and well developed.
Users aside, I do feel safe in saying that the UK is far ahead of Australia in the field of egovernment. While some Australian Commonwealth agencies are still struggling to introduce Web content management systems some UK local councils are now adding advanced Web 2.0 features as below (and it's not the only example, just currently the best one).
Redbridge-i
Redbridge Borough's website is a leading example of user customisable government websites in the UK and is recognised as a world leader.
As a London Borough with roughly 250,000 constituents, Redbridge's site was developed on the basis that the public own the local administration and should have the ability to comment on services and engage on an ongoing basis with the council.
It drew from best practice private sector websites, incorporating features from sites such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Facebook.
Part of the design philosophy was to allow the public to decide what was most important to them. Therefore, except for a fixed space in the upper right, the website's homepage can be reorganised as desired by individual citizens, with sections able to be dragged and dropped to other locations on the page and content hidden or show.
The site can also be customised by postcode to show the services most relevant to individual households.
Another decision was to continuously innovate, develop and release new features and let citizens decide how valuable they are. This taps into actual citizen behaviour, rather than anticipated behaviour and provides a uage-based measure of what the website's users will use than do focus groups and wishlists.
One particularly successful feature of the site are the forums supporting community consultation. Councillors are active at responding and use the forums to identify comment trends and useful stakeholders to inform council decision-making processes.
The site also has a growing transactional function and has demonstrated cost saving by transferring business from phone and face-to-face channels.
The site was developed in-house over a nine month period by a team of up to 6 people, with up to 500 staff consulted about the development, and released in 2007.
The best way to learn to learn the site is to play with it. It really is easy to use and effective at task completion.
More information about the site is available from the Innovation in local government services awards page.
A very good 5 minute video about the Redbridge-i website is available at Localgov.tv.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Why do some local councils in the UK have better websites than some Commonwealth agencies in Australia? | Tweet |
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Who is watching The Hollowmen? | Tweet |
For a fantastic (satirical) look into the halls of power in Canberra, the ABC's The Hollowmen is a great watch.
What does this have to do with eGovernment?
Well in Episode 2 it does suggest that 90% of what most of our overseas embassies do could be done remotely via the internet with a few local staff.
Now that's an interesting thought!
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Do people want the same things from council, state and federal government websites? | Tweet |
The UK recently held its annual seminar on How to build the perfect council website.
This discussed strategic approaches to egovernment at a local level and provided key insights into what local residents needed and expected from their councils and shires.
Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council, one of the presenters, has provided a synopsis of his observations and thoughts from the event in a post titled Thoughts on a “perfect council website”.
Reading his post, I do not see enormous differences between what it appears people want from local councils and what they want from state and Federal agencies;
Presentations from the 2007 seminar are available online and I am hopeful that the 2008 presentations will be as well soon.
- Get rid of those damn press releases (who the heck reads them).
- Stop the political messages (Our Leader).
- Nobody cares for this stuff, they are task focused and don’t have much time.
- We already take their money and if we take even more of there time we will only create more frustrated citizens and visitors.
- Delete most of your content as nobody reads or even maintains the stuff.
- 80% of web management is observing behaviour.
- Do the tasks your customers do and experience the “journey” yourself.
- Personalisation doesn’t work, most people don’t want to do it - interesting considering i was on the panel about web 2.0 techniques with “Steve Johnson” from Redbridge and “Suraj Kiki” founder of Jadu CMS, more on this later)
- Start with your top tasks and get them on your homepage to stop people having to search for them.
- Don’t force “corporate” crap at your customers, they don’t really care
Friday, July 18, 2008
What's next for your agency's search tools? Google testing user rated search | Tweet |
Some readers may be aware of Digg, a site where the users vote on news stories and those with the most votes get listed on the homepage.
It's an approach based on a news site's users knowing more about what they want to see than the professional news makers - and it has been relatively successful to-date (valued north of US$100 million).
Google has been testing similar features, allowing individuals to rate search results and make comments, then in future searches only see the results they prefer.
This would also be an interesting feature within websites and intranets, providing a human way to validate the search acronyms in use and ensure that the most relevant result - as determined by a person - is displayed at top.
Now this is still in 'bucket' testing at Google - meaning that a small select group of their users get to see the function. However TechCrunch has provided a video on what users see and how the system works.
Take a look below, or read the article Is This The Future Of Search?
Can you see uses in this for your website or intranet?
Should there be paid advertisements on Australian government websites? | Tweet |
The Investments blog posted a thought-provoking post a few days ago, asking Should Government Websites Be Allowed to Post Google Ads to Offset Deficient Budgets?
This was based on a question put to 'Father of the internet' and Google head evangelist, Vinton Cerf, who was asked at an eGovernment seminar,
"if he thought that there was a way for Google to have special “Google AdSense” for government websites. He smiled one of his famous smiles and indicated he liked the question very much."This post went on to raise the point that certain advertising may be appropriate on government website, related to not-for-profit support organisations and services that help users of government services.
The hosting of these ads would provide a revenue stream for government sites, helping to offset their costs. Ads could be carefully placed with a disclaimer to ensure it was clear to visitors that these were advertisement and manage any legal issues around endorsement.
It is an intriguing concept, and not entirely dissimilar to how CSIRO commercialises intellectual capital or agencies such as ABS have monetised their reports and products.
Now I'm not the first to suggest this be considered for Australian government sites.
Net Traveller author, Tom Worthington, made a slightly different suggestion in a post on January 2007,
Governments may not wish to have paid commercial advertising on their web sites, but perhaps they could have internal government advertising. Each government web page could have a space reserved for advertising. Normally this would be used to promote government initiatives and publicize web sites (in effect the Government's own Google AdWords). The reserved space would also be used to advise the public of emergency information (emergency information is an area where Federal and State Australian governments do poorly online and as a result are placing the lives of citizens at risk).
There is also at least one government site in Australia already featuring paid commercial advertising. Ourbrisbane.com, owned and operated by the Brisbane City Council.
This site features ads for services such as Seek and RSVP as well as other advertisers.
Looking around the world, there are other examples of the acceptance of advertising on government sites.
US experience
In the US while there is an overall policy that government sites should not feature paid advertising, exemptions can be granted, as detailed in Webcontent.gov, the guide to managing US government websites.
I've found evidence that advertising has government sites in the US offering paid advertising for at least four years, as evidenced by this article in Slashdot on 27 July 2004, Advertising Hits Arizona County Government Website,
Maricopa County, home to 3.4 million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has seen their GIS website "become an every day tool for realtors, developers, mortgage and title companies, appraisers, inspectors, attorneys and many other professionals associated with the real estate industry." As a result, they are now accepting bids for Web advertisements. As the county is one of the best-run in the nation, this could set quite the precedent.The Maricopa County website is still delivering paid advertising to Phoenix's citizens today.
UK experience
In the UK there is an even more pragmatic approach.
Within the UK Cabinet's guidelines for web site management is included a guide for buying and selling advertising and sponsorship space which states;
Advertising on the web is envisaged as being a revenue stream for government websites. It can reduce the cost of providing government information and services, which saves the taxpayer money or results in better quality services and faster delivery of information and services on-line. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do as long as the guidelines are adhered to.This guideline was first written in 2002 and remains in force today, six years later, indicating to me that there has not been any major backlash by citizens towards advertising on government sites.
What do you think?
So what do you think of the idea of placing paid advertising on Australian government websites?
Would it be appropriate for your website?
Would a revenue stream help raise the profile of your site in the department?
