States of Jersey's website ranked top in UK

24 August 2015

​For the first time, the States of Jersey’s website has taken first place in the Sitemorse UK local government quarterly index.

Sitemorse, which audits a wide range of public and private sector websites, has published the results of its latest (third quarter) index, in which Jersey was assessed alongside 423 local government websites in the UK. Ranked immediately below Jersey were Enfield in second place, and North Devon and Cornwall in third.

Reasons cited by Sitemorse for Jersey’s top ranking included ‘a relentless focus on creating good online customer service’, ‘gaining valuable customer feedback through the website over the past ten months’ and ‘a strong commitment to the e-Gov programme’.

Commenting on the news that the 10,000 page website had placed first, the States of Jersey’s Web Services Manager, Marcus Ferbrache, said “This accolade reflects the efforts of our content and technical teams as we strive to continually improve the quality of the gov.je site. We hope that people will find the self-service approach of finding the information they need on gov.je to be quicker and more convenient than contacting a States department directly.

“We know people get frustrated if things don’t work as they should, so we take quality seriously. Gov.je is a big website, with more than 10,000 pages which makes it difficult to spot any problems like broken links, or pages that might not display properly on different devices. We rely on Sitemorse to regularly scan the site and automatically alert us to problems.”