Website success measures

1) Website questionnaire

Along with around 120 other council websites, dorsetforyou.com uses an online questionnaire to ask its users what they think of the website. This pops up for every fifth visitor who hasn't already filled it in during the current calendar year.

Based on a sample of nearly 1000 customers who fill in the questionnaire every quarter, 75% were 'very satisfied', 'quite satisfied' or 'okay' when asked about the 'overall satisfaction' of their visit to Dorsetforyou.com in the latest quarter (Oct-Dec 2012).  This is slightly below the benchmark for all other councils of 78%.

See  Quarterly website success measures (1 Oct - 31 Dec 2012) (excel, 91kb) (opens in a new window) for results from the key areas of the survey - overall satisfaction, value of information, findability, site search and look & feel.

Overall satisfaction has increased since we started using it in 2008. But, whilst it's great to know that our customers value the improvements we have made, we are fully aware through feedback received via this questionnaire and other feedback mechanisms that further improvements need to be made.

2) Website traffic

See monthly website traffic statistics for details, including the total number of visits, unique visitors and page views.

These statistics include most, but not all of our applications, so slightly underestimates the true figure. We will continue to work with external suppliers and IT colleagues to add Google Analytics code to more and more dorsetforyou.com applications, thereby getting a clearer idea of how users navigate the whole of dorsetforyou.com and gathering a more complete picture of overall website usage.

3) Website availability

We monitor the availability of 40 sections of dorsetforyou.com every 15 minutes using an external company. IT colleagues and the central team are then automatically notified if any application becomes unavailable. This allows us to minimise any disruption to service. We weight the various applications according to their usage.

• Overall availability for the financial year 2010/11 was 99.47%
• Our overall annual target for uptime is 99.5%

Detailed uptime by each application for 2010/11 (excel, 78kb) (opens in a new window) .

4) Kampyle 'give feedback' comments

• Over 1000 items of feedback are received each quarter. These are proactively used to resolve issues raised

5) Social media usage (as of 4 January 2013)

• Twitter followers - 6180
• Facebook likes - 755
• YouTube video views - 175,827
• 159 Flickr group members who have submitted 4022 photos

6) Socitm annual website audit

Once a year, all council websites are audited by the Society of IT Managers (Socitm) (opens in a new window) . The audit for the 2012 report took place from November - December 2011.

The results for all Dorsetforyou.com partner councils out of a maximum of 4 stars were as follows (last year's figure in brackets):

• Christchurch BC - 2 stars (2011 - 2 stars) - stayed the same
• Dorset County Council - 3 stars (2011 - 2 stars) - improvement
• East Dorset - 3 stars (2011 - 1 star) - improvement
• North Dorset - 2 stars (2011 - 1 star) - improvement
• Purbeck - 3 stars (2011 - 2 stars) - improvement
• West Dorset - 3 stars (2011 - 2 stars) - improvement
• Weymouth & Portland - 3 stars (2011 - 2 stars) - improvement

Dorset County Council only missed a top 4 star ranking by one criterion (only 23 councils achieved 4 star). It was also listed as one of the top 7 performing county council websites.