The Whakatāne District Council’s website has been rated the best of the 78 local government websites evaluated by the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM).

Each year, ALGIM evaluates all New Zealand city, district and regional council websites, based on their adherence to web standards, accessibility testing done by the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind, accessibility on mobile devices, and response times to email and Facebook queries.

Council Public Affairs Manager Ross Boreham says the website’s improvement in the ALGIM rankings over the past three years confirms an ongoing commitment to providing the best possible customer service via the Council’s online channels. “In the 2013 ALGIM rankings, Whakatāne District Council ranked 25th out of 78. Following a website redesign and the addition of new online services, our ranking improved to third in 2014,” Mr Boreham says.

“We used feedback from the 2014 ALGIM survey to find further ways of improving our performance. These included the addition of new services, such as online mapping and dog registration.”

Another key feature contributing to the website’s award-winning status is the use of responsive design, meaning that it can be easily accessed and viewed across multiple platforms including tablets and smartphones. 

Mr Boreham says because the website redevelopment relied largely on in-house skills and resources, with assistance from local company Klixo, the entire programme has been achieved within the Council’s normal operating budgets.

He notes that ALGIM’s evaluation standards were much stricter this year. “Previous years’ assessments placed a higher weighting on councils’ self-evaluations of their website services. In 2015, that component reduced and ALGIM placed more emphasis on its own, independent performance evaluation. That our website took the top ranking under those circumstances, in competition with much larger and better-resourced councils, is a significant accomplishment.”