County council website among the best in the country

The council was awarded the ‘SOCITM Web Award’ 2015. SOCITM is the national network and representative body for professionals delivering public services for the benefit of people and communities through the effective use of information and digital technology.

The award follows a four star rating for Oxfordshire County Council in SOCITM’s Better Connected Annual report earlier this year, and the council’s website being named one as of the top 20 best practice local authority websites in the report.

Oxfordshire County Council  received the highest reviewer ratings across all tasks and themes and was selected as an example of good practice in six separate parts of SOCITM’s survey.

The council also appeared as one of six out of 204 councils with social care functions with top marks for social care tasks - currently a problematic area for most councils.

SOCITM’s reviewer concluded that Oxfordshire County Council’s website was: “A very good mobile experience” and had “lots of good quality information and practice on the website.” The reviewer concluded: “I enjoyed looking at this website, it has a very high quality and professional appearance.”      

High quality foundations

Councillor Nick Carter, Oxfordshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Business and Customer Services said: “This is excellent news. Our website clearly compares very well to those of our peer local authorities around the country. My congratulations go to our web and customer service teams for this achievement.

“There are challenges ahead for all councils as digitalisation moves along at pace. People’s expectations of what they will be able to do on a council website are rising all of the time and we want to respond to that. Many of our customer service channels will become digital in coming years which will put more emphasis than ever before on the experience people have of using our website.

“We are far from complacent and there is a lot of work ahead in this area. However this award shows that we clearly have high quality foundations on which to be proposing further use of ‘digital’ as an enabler for further service improvements.”