The UK’s best local government websites are in North Devon, South Wales and Leicestershire, according to new research from Sitemorse.

More than 20 council websites scored highly in the Sitemorse UK Local Government Q4 2011 benchmark, each scoring more than seven out of ten marks in a website survey covering more than 400 of the UK’s local government organisations.

Sharing the honours with a mark of 9.4 each are the North Devon Council and the Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, while just behind them at 9.0 is Leicester-based Blaby District Council.

Also scoring very highly in the survey were the London Borough of Hillingdon, top of the Q3 survey and rated fourth this time, North Down Council, based in Northern Ireland, another previous winner, local councils in Fife and East Dumbartonshire – Fife having moved 300 places up our table since the last survey - Dorking-based Mole Valley District Council, Vale of Glamorgan, Gwynedd, Larne, Highland, Aberdeen, and southern-based Wycombe and Slough councils.

Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The council websites 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 at http://www.sitemorse.com/rt/805/a2a1c32d.

Barnstaple-based North Devon Council has an area covering more than 400 miles of England’s finest countryside and coastline. Like all local council websites, its site has a huge variety of audiences. The council’s mission is to improve the quality of life for everyone in North Devon and the website is strong on accessibility, providing large print, Braille and audio facilities for disabled users.

The Rhondda Cynon Taf website has an eye-catching display designed to inform a wide group of users and offers online registration for voting, the facility to pay council tax online and a postcode-based search facility so residents can find and contact their local councillor. The Rhondda site has moved up 34 places since the Q3 survey of local government sites.

As in so many of our surveys, it was not all good news, of course, and around 30 sites scored less than three out of ten in the listing. Councils at the bottom of our table include East Staffordshire, Denbighshire, Teignbridge, Derry, Nottingham and Rushcliffe.

Sitemorse concluded: Councils have a tough job with websites which have to inform and appeal to a huge number of audiences. Our survey shows very many of them are taking this mission very seriously, with high scores on accessibility and functionality. The winners of this survey are not the biggest and best-known local councils but as so often happens, the ones who go the extra mile to create a good experience for their users.

About our surveys

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility.

Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best.

Sitemorse is the product of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.

Technical Data

This survey took place on November 20 2011 and involved benchmarking more than a million URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for Conwy Borough Council’s site, with more than 82,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site was South Norfolk Council.

About Sitemorse

Sitemorse is the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking. With nothing to set up or manage, Sitemorse's services are focused on optimising visitor experience, improving search rankings, protecting brand, IP and compliance. Covering performance, compliance (accessibility, brand, code, regulatory, SEO) and quality - from one to a million pages, monitoring from every second to every year, and everything in-between - Sitemorse delivers control and confidence for the Internet and Intranet sites of hundreds of clients.