| 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. (c)2009 Emerald Group Publishing Limited. |
| Notes | This paper aims to evaluate the web accessibility of European municipal websites. Countries that was researched included Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Span, Sweden and the UK. It manually accessed 84 European municipal websites against an original Web Assessment Index. Four main criteria were used, namely, accessibility, speed, navigability and site content. Results showed that four German cities had higher score in accessibility, as compared to other countries. North Lanarkshire, Valencia, Paris, Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool were having higher score in speed. About 70% of the websites had good navigability. Italian, British and Spanish had the highest score in site content what indicated that their municipal web pages had the necessary information. |
