Today the SOCITM report for local authority websites was released. I had been eagerly anticipating release of the report this year because my work for South Lanarkshire Council would be featured.
Although I wasn’t working with SLC the previous year, I was critical of the report because I felt it was inaccurate in its findings. I’m a big critic of council websites and SLC are no different unfortunately. The SOCITM report actually praised the council website whereas I found it to be lacking in several area.
That said, SLC currently are very much restricted by the “content management system” that they use (I’ll use that phrase very loosely because what they have isn’t a CMS as far as the industry goes). The CMS is something they are looking to change for the next SOCITM report.
However, the big positive for me from this years report was around the SLC search facility. Back in November I implemented a Google Mini Search Appliance on the SLC website. In has had great feedback and search is now more relevant than its Oracle PL/SQL predecessor.
SOCITM commented:
Yet another Google implementation, but this one seems perfect. Instant results, with the most relevant pages returned, very little dross accompanying it, no gaps at all. It seems simple but this is the first I’ve seen which gains full marks across the board.
(Note that in 2008 the search engine was reported as being quite poor, but that problem has been completely resolved with a new search engine.)
It’s a small feather in my cap but just the tip of the iceberg, they still have much to do to improve the overall user journey or the site. I feel there has to be a shift from a focus on content to being more task centric.
Posted by Steven Grant on 03/02 at 12:14 PM
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