I’m the Departmental Website Review Officer at COI – I believe LTT referred to me as the ‘Wacky Webrat guy’ however that may owe more to alliterative convenience than reality because in any event, the programme is ‘Website Review’ rather than ‘Website rationalisation’. As for being wacky, I enjoy a cup of tea and an episode of Bergerac after a hard day’s work. Admittedly Bergerac could be quite a ‘wacky’ show at times, as anyone who has seen ‘What Dreams May Come’ will attest.
Speaking of work, the world of Website Review is a busy one right now as several processes continue to move forward simultaneously. The end of another quarter is almost upon us with the attendant figures and reports that will entail. More immediately there is a large Freedom of Information Request pending which will require information on the entire programme.
Last month we submitted a list to Parliament of all the websites closed and committed to close – thanks to all departments for your assistance in putting this together at short notice.
On a less positive note, a few new websites have been coming out of the woodwork as of late.
‘The end result is that the citizen who needs multiple services is left to join up the various islands of service to meet his or her needs. As departments do not appear to accept each other’s identification of the citizen, the citizen has to validate his or her identity at each service transaction. This model of service provision is underpinned by a mass of helplines, call centres, front-line offices and websites.’
It should be clear to everyone by now that when it comes to the internet, people’s browsing habits tend to be focussed and functional. Recent research has shown that emailing remains the most popular online activity, with 90% of surfers using the internet to send and receive messages, 71% of those using the internet say they have read a blog and nearly two-thirds of active internet users have joined a social network site. Other than this, popular activities online include reading news sites, Wikipedia and online shopping.
In all cases, usage is concentrated towards certain ‘super-sites’ and so it is becoming with the government domain – Directgov now boasts over 15 million visits a month and 8 million unique users.
All of which points towards the logical way for a government department to reach an audience being to use a popular existing portal of communication for what they have to say, rather than establishing a new one each time there is something new to say and going through the associated start-up and fight for audience in a crowded marketplace with users most accustomed with visiting their favourite, and most trusted, sites.
One of which is, of course, the Government Website Database – which sits on The National Archives website. Within the space of just a few months we have successfully switched to using this, from a previous system of Excel spreadsheets. I hope all users are finding it a boon and have begun to extract reports through the recently released Reporting tool. For more information on any of the latter points, or indeed any questions about Bergerac, please contact me and I will be more than happy to inform.
