Quantitative assessment of European municipal web sites

Abstract

Purpose -The internet is becoming increasingly important in the communication between local governments and citizens, which makes the usability of municipal web sites a critical factor in government-citizen communication. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model for evaluating the potential of municipal web sites. Design/methodology/approach -In this work an objective investigation of the issue has been conducted by manually accessing and evaluating 84 European municipal web sites. Quality of web home pages was determined using an original Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content. Findings -A detailed report of the results arising from this investigation is presented and systematically analyzed. Originality/value -The most valuable output from this paper is not the ability to identify the best sites, but to see how each municipal site is compared to related sites and to spot ideas and practices that can improve city sites. These findings will be useful for both researchers and practitioners who seek to understand the issues relevant to municipal e-government.

Availability and findability of FOI and privacy statements on Finnish municipalities’ websites

“…The results are in line with previous findings (e.g. Dias et al, 2013;Beldad et al, 2009 andMiranda et al, 2009) that have indicated that not all municipalities regard FOI and privacy issues as a priority, and that not all municipalities bother to post the statements on their website. Although the Finnish FOI tradition has longer roots than the FOI practices in most countries, there were no differences in how FOI and privacy statements were presented at municipal websites.…”

“…A large search result did not necessarily mean that the information retrieved was relevant, because a large search result often provided useless, outdated and irrelevant information. This is again in line with previous findings which have demonstrated that municipal websites have links that point to nonexistent privacy policies (Dias et al, 2013); most municipalities do not ensure the findability of privacy statements (Beldad et al, 2009); most often information that is available on a municipal website is related to buses, museums, libraries, touristic and culture (Miranda et al, 2009); and, websites are structurally difficult to navigate, and therefore the sites are in fact not open or accessible for citizens and the information they need cannot be found (West, 2004).…”

Understanding e-government research

“…The evidence found in this research shows that the efforts made by public administrations to involve citizens in public affairs is one of the main topics (Miranda et al, 2009) Furthermore, e-participation and deliberative democracy have been among the main topics studied. However, our results indicate that there are aspects of this research topic that have not been widely covered by researchers such as the different barriers and restrictions faced by citizens when accessing new interactive tools which means that participation is not complete, and also how different governmental strategies could encourage this participation (Julnes and Johnson 2011).…”

The Use of Internet as a Marketing Tool - Evaluating the Websites of Spain's Top Restaurants

“…In order to avoid the shortcomings of previous models of this type, Buenadicha et al (2001) developed a new quantitative evaluation index, the Web Assessment Index (WAI), for use in evaluating how organizations of different types currently use the Internet. This index has been used successfully to assess the sites of different types of organizations (Miranda and Bañegil, 2004;Miranda et al, 2006Miranda et al, , 2009Miranda et al, , 2010. For the present work, this index was adapted to the restaurant sector after consultation with various experts on the Internet and on tourism.…”