Media-Insert Communications

Media-Insert Communications

The blog of Media-Insert Communications – featuring freelance P.R. and journalism links to the work of Graham A. Jarvis.

Editing, Journalism, Copywriting, and Public Relations

“Councils are getting better but not quickly enough!” Says Martin Greenwood, SOCITM’s Insight Programme Manager, who believes that Councils could still do better and make their websites more accessible. Yet local authority sites have achieved an overall 25% improvement by reducing the number of technical errors across the sector. These errors may have often been caused by the failure to check and monitor the compliance of html coding.

“Awareness has increased greatly”; he adds. He believes that SOCITM’s Better Connected reports have helped enormously, and it also down to website accessibility being “built into government targets for priority outcomes”.

SOCITM is working with the RNIB and its own partner to help them to improve, so Greenwood speaks about website accessibility generally. Even so he reveals that the technical resilience of websites has increased significantly over the last two years. This is particularly because Council websites, he explains, “have become more transactional and more critical to local authority business, and their performance on points such as speed of opening up home page has become much more important.”

Automated testing and monitoring products like SiteMorse, he thinks, satisfy the need and operational imperative for gathering performance information. Lastly, he concludes: “The public nature of the web makes it feasible for suppliers to provide a very useful service. Our annual Better Connected reports have highlighted the improvements being made. “

By Graham Jarvis
Editor and Media Services Consultant

Email: editor@cimtech.org

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