London’s Hillingdon Borough has the best –working website, closely followed by North East Lincolnshire and High Wycombe, according to a new Website Benchmark from Sitemorse

Results of the UK Local Government Q3 2011 Survey show clearly there’s no North/South divide when it comes to good websites, as the best tested come from all over the country. Among the very top performers, the neighbouring boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow scored top marks, while Devon and Cornwall both did very well, and councils from the north such as NE Lincolnshire and Salford also received top scores.

Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of public and corporate organisations, and is the foremost organisation to do such benchmarking and publish the detailed results. The websites of more than 400 local government organisations were audited to see how they performed against a list of criteria including code quality, accessibility and compliance. The full results from the survey can be seen here.

Hillingdon’s site is no stranger to the top of Sitemorse’s local government surveys, and has consistently performed above targets in more than 50 surveys over the last five years. Hillingdon’s first website went live on the web just fourteen years ago, and the current site is version nine of a continually-improving service to local residents. The site is run from a central database, optimised for mobile devices and web managers at the council have worked hard to improve the speed of delivery.

Grimsby-based North East Lincolnshire Council’s site is also no stranger to continuous improvement. The current website has leapfrogged an amazing 270 places since our last local government survey earlier this year, making NE Lincs the biggest climber as well as second-best site. At the time of writing users of council services are being invited to contribute suggestions as to how the website can be developed. Midlothian, Belfast, Amber Valley and Bournemouth have all climbed more than 200 places since the last survey thanks to site improvements.

The High Wycombe site has again performed highly in our audits since 2006, and offers a tailored menu of services to a multicultural audience with accessibility issues high on the website agenda.

The news isn’t all great – although the above mentioned sites all scored more than nine out of ten in our survey. Only nine of the sites tested were regarded as “error free” by Sitemorse, and two websites, Denbighshire and East Staffordshire, scored less than two in our audit. As well as big climbers, we have had big ‘fallers’ in this survey, with Watford, Lewisham, Swindon down more than 200 places. North Somerset is the biggest faller, and has lost 321 places since the last survey. Websites for Derry and Selby failed basic accessibility tests on every page.

One regular complaint from web users is slow-loading sites, and in this survey east Staffordshire has the dubious distinction of being ranked lowest in the survey and also slowest in our tests, with an average wait of 54 seconds to load the page. Fastest loading council site is currently Hampshire.