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How can councils achieve excellence in a continually evolving market? Well you need to constantly innovate, and that’s even if you are part of a local authority. Being top of a league is great, but no council should wrest on its laurels once it has reached the top. It’s only the beginning! Like many other aspects of a local authority’s business, websites change constantly. So the attainment of excellence comes with change, fresh thinking and hard work.

Therefore local authorities need to continue to look at the big picture (e.g. changes in Government policy, the impact of scaleable websites and the content or developmental changes to them, the impact upon working practices and customer relations, business processes, the integration of various types of technologies etc.), and this will enable your organisation to continually meet Government targets along with the requirements for local authorities called ‘priority outcomes’ in a citizen-centric fashion and with a long-term perspective applied to ensure success.

This is all part of the modernisation of local government and the public sector more generally. This includes moving websites away from just providing information to being fully transactional, enabling citizens to be self-serving, communicating with councils through a wide variety of channels and transacting ‘on demand’.

Furthermore by getting it right, like Hounslow, seems to have been done by incorporating the tools of SiteMorse – the ‘Global leaders in automated website testing’ – into its web development programme, local authorities can take a advantage of a number of benefits. It is said that Hounslow, for example, has saved the council money, because SiteMorse’s tool found a number of errors, which were then quickly fixed to ensure quality and compliance.

Adopt new approaches

So to keep ahead councils need to be proactive, innovative, dynamic and flexible in their approach to the implementation of e-Government and e-democracy strategies. Websites should be viewed as a means of facilitating a greater interaction with their constituents, their customers if you like, of all kinds and abilities. So it is important, not just to gain an invaluable league table perspective, but to ensure that the content enables a level of interactivity, and that the site itself is both useable and accessible. Most councils also strive for efficiency gains, which can lead to a more effective use of available resources.

The process is ongoing, and freeware products may be free at the first point of access, but they may cost much more than other solutions, used for facilitating the drive for e-Government best practice. It is also important to establish some attainable benchmarks, and this usually revolves around saving time, money and human resources.

Costs, for example, can be rationalised by creating economies of scale with an authority-wide delivery of solutions. Individual deployments on the other hand lack control and they can deliver varying results. New and existing legislation and best practice guidelines need to be incorporated into this approach too. This includes compliance to the Freedom of Information Act, the Data Protection Act, the Disability Discrimination Act and the W3C’s website accessibility guidelines. SiteMorse’s tools can help organisations to comply with the latter ones.

Hounslow strives for excellence

Hounslow is just one of the councils in the UK striving for excellence, and its web team has achieved great heights. It has moved the site from the bottom of the SiteMorse league table to the very top. Hounslow used the company’s website performance, monitoring and accessibility testing tools to assist its web team members at all phases of the web development process. The tools were also used to assess the failures of the local authority’s old website, with the aim of planning how to:

• Improve the website’s accessibility and performance for users;
• To monitor the technical development of their new site and post launch;
• To continuously review performance on an ongoing basis.

The challenges facing Hounslow

The council faced tight web development schedules, and so it was important to have a tool that could speed up this process, and so SiteMorse’s tools formed an important and integral part of enabling Hounslow to deliver a user-centred, enhanced website on time and to budget. So the Hounslow Web Team needed to develop a modernised website, capable of electronic government delivery in the context of rising public expectations and all the usual constraints on resources.

“We didn’t have the capacity or resources to conduct thorough website testing and analysis in-house” explains Zoë Laycock, the Hounslow Web Manager. “We used the SiteMorse testing and rankings to help us build a picture of how our website was doing in terms of performance and how to deliver what people need.”

In addition, the SiteMorse website rankings helped Hounslow assess how they were performing in their e-delivery as a council in relation to other local authorities. These two measures also strengthened the business case for improving the council’s online offer. The league tables themselves are considered to be a respected benchmarking tool, and they aim to encourage organisations, both public and commercial, to improve the quality of their websites. The great thing about Hounslow is that it has met the challenge with enthusiasm.

Stepping forward to the technical development phase of the new Hounslow website, the testing and analysis tools were continuously used to measure and test development progress prior to website launch. This enabled the web team to fine-tune and optimise the website to ensure upon launch that the new site not only looked better but functionally performed well. Along with other web accessibility testing tools, SiteMorse testing was integral to assisting Hounslow in improving accessibility and general code compliance. It can also improve customer relationships, whereas a poorly maintained and performing website doesn’t.

On the charge: the Hounslow approach

The council has integrated SiteMorse’s services into the heart of every phase of their web project, which has resulted in measurable online customer service benefits. A month after the new Hounslow website was re-launched, the website earned the biggest improvement in the history of the independent website league tables. This approach demonstrates the benefits of moving beyond viewing the firm’s services exclusively in terms of league tables. Instead, SiteMorse services are central to this West London authority’s strategic e-Government and modernisation agenda.

Moreover, the council has had the foresight to think ahead into the long-term, which is quite unusual in most Government and local authority circles. Most look for short-term gains, which can create greater inefficiencies down the line. Councils should in fact be learning from innovative authorities like Hounslow, and adopt new approaches. This should perhaps include meeting all of the Government’s priority outcomes in one go rather than in costly stages.

There’s no use in throwing good money after bad. In fact Hounslow demonstrates how to achieve compliance, customer or even citizen-centricity, value for money with a tight budget and within a tight timeframe.  There is also marketing and PR value in being able to show a commitment to developing quality, well performing websites, with the SiteMorse leagues tables, and the performance, monitoring and testing tools. Hounslow’s strategic approach also sets a standard of best practice that others should perhaps follow.

About SiteMorse

SiteMorse, formed in May ‘2001, provides organisations with website testing and monitoring solutions that ensure websites are delivering a well performing, compliant and error free user experience. SiteMorse requires no customer downloads or technical skills to operate.

SiteMorse tests using established guidelines and standards e.g. IETF, W3C, [WAI accessibility] and Government regulations. SiteMorse also offer a range of user experience, journey and load testing services.

SiteMorse is the most widely use automated testing tool in Local Government. It is also widely used in most other sectors, including; FTSE100, Central Government, Banking, Retail, Travel and SME’s.

For more information about SiteMorse, please visit: http://www.sitemorse.com or email nickles@sitemorse.com.

About Hounslow

Hounslow was one of the first wave of local authorities to take up the challenge to modernise local government in early 1999. A pilot model – of leader and cabinet, scrutiny panels and local area committees – was developed in consultation with local people and their views on issues such as local decision making and the role of the cabinet\executive were taken into account. The eighteen-month pilot has given the Council a head start to move forward enthusiastically towards the modernised local government framework outlined in the Local Government Act 2000. We also led the way as the first Council to webcast live Council meetings in 2001.

For more information, please visit: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/

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Researched and produced on behalf of SiteMorse by Media-Insert: Graham Jarvis Media Services with the kind help of the London Borough of Hounslow. Blog: http://www.media-insert.co.uk. Tel: +44 (0)776 682 3644.