The independent assessment of e-government by the Society for Information Technology Managers (Socitm) ranked Wandsworth's website in the top 20 nationwide for the fourth year in a row.
Out of 468 local government websites inspected by Socitm, Wandsworth's was one of only 60 that were found to be "transactional'. This description is only given to websites that are "accessible, complete, thoughtful and coherent".
Improvements over the past 12 months have included the launch of a new online diary service - www.wandsworthevents.com - that allows subscribers to receive free weekly emails containing details of thousands of local events and activities.
The service is the first of its kind to be offered by any council in the UK and covers everything from local cinema listings to exercise classes and tennis lessons.
The service will also send email alerts to people when pubs and bars in their neighbourhood apply for new alcohol licences. This keeps local people fully informed about any proposals for extended drinking hours in their neighbourhoods.
Other new services include facilities for businesses to make online licensing applications and even to carry out self-assessments for compliance with health and safety, food safety and other legislation.
A new RSS feed enables users to keep up to date with the news from the council and online campaigns on local issues that have attracted enormous public interest. Recent campaigns include calls for improvements to Clapham Junction and allowing passengers to use pre-pay Oyster Cards on overground rail services.
Over the past year more than 8.5 million pages have been viewed on the council's website by over 1.6 million visitors. On an average working day more than 7,000 individual visitors log onto the site.
The most popular sections remain the online planning register, the travel planner, the parking service and the facilities for making online payments for council tax and other bills.
Deputy council leader Maurice Heaster said: "For the fourth year running our website has been named as one of the country's best by a distinguished panel of experts. Indeed ours is the only one to have been identified in this elite group since these studies first began.
"People expect to be able to access huge amounts of information about town hall services via the internet. Ensuring that this information is readily available and that a wide range of transactions can be conducted quickly and easily online is the key to our success.
"We were one of the first councils in the country to recognise the advantages of having a transactional website that could make a real difference to our residents. So if you want to reserve a library book, register to vote, catch up on local news or even log a broken pavement, the council's website is the place to do it."
The Socitm "Better Connected" assessment explored the ability of websites to respond to the needs of a range of typical local authority customers and tested performance in the areas of joined-up government, interactive applications, currency of information, usability and responsiveness to email.
Quelle: eGov monitor, 08.03.2006
