County Council website in top 10

Shropshire County Council’s website has been judged as one of the 10 best county council websites in the UK by the Society of Information Technology Management (SocITM).

SocITM carries out an annual inspection of all council websites. The national inspectors assessed the website across a range of features including: quality of content, currency of information, online transactions, navigation and usability. They found the site to be useful, interesting and engaging, with a very good homepage.

The site was especially praised as an example of good practice for library services, joined-up working with district councils, and for higher than expected web use by customers for a shire county.

This website contains around 9,000 pages of information and services and is visited around 2 million times each month by around 123,000 customers. The most popular areas of the website include: publications, job vacancies, community information, news, schools, libraries, and Shropshire facts and figures.

Mike Owen, Shropshire County Council’s Cabinet member for community well-being, said “This is a great endorsement for our website, of which we are very proud. Our website shows our determination to put our customers at the heart of everything we do, by providing instant access to high-quality online information and services, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Over 180 computers are available for use free of charge in libraries, and in 35 broadplaces across Shropshire.

5 March 2008