Webportals – websites that operate as front doors or guides into government on the web – are central to government web strategy and presence. However, little is known about their success in enabling people to quickly and accurately access public sector information and services. In these days of Google and generic web search engines, government webportals are not the only way to find government on the web. This paper argues that an effective evaluation of government webportals requires shifting from a website perspective to a whole-of-web (or web ecology) perspective. This perspective is illuminated by an online quasi-experiment of the effectiveness of the British government’s webportal, www.gov.uk. Participants’ performance in using the webportal to find information about public services were compared with those using commercial web search tools (such as Google). There was mixed evidence that the portal provided greater accuracy in finding public service information, but no evidence for greater speeds. The findings suggest that government web strategy focus less on creating large webportals and more on small functionally-defined web units that offer enhanced opportunities for commercial search engine discoverability and flexibility for change.
6, P.Leat,D.Setzler,K., & Stoker,G. (2002). Towards holistic governance: The new reform agenda. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
3.
Aula,A.Khan,R. M., & Guan,Z. (2010). How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult? Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
4.
Australia. (2018a). About australia.gov.au. Retrieved from http://www.australia.gov.au/about.
5.
Australia. (2018b). GOV.AU Performance Dashboard. Retrieved from https://dashboard.gov.au/dashboards/1-mygov.
6.
Booth,D., & Jansen,B. J. (2010). A review of methodologies for analyzing websites. In Web technologies: Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications (pp. 145-166): IGI Global.
7.
Chen,S. Y., & Macredie,R. (2010). Web-based interaction: A review of three important human factors. International Journal of Information Management, 30(5), 379-387.
8.
Christensen,T., & Lægreid,P. (2007). The whole-of-government approach to public sector reform. Public Administration Review, 67(6), 1059-1066.
9.
Clifton,B. (2012). Advanced web metrics with Google Analytics. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
10.
Cross,M. (2007, 22 August). Portal Contact. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/aug/22/guardiansocietysupplement.egovernment.
11.
Dhyani,D.Ng,W. K., & Bhowmick,S. (2002). A survey of web metrics. ACM Computing Surveys, 34(4), 469-503.
12.
Dunleavy,P.Margetts,H.Bartholomeou,P.Bastow,S.Escher,T.Pearce,O., et al., (2007). Government on the Internet: Progress in delivering information and services online: Research Report. Retrieved from http://www.governmentontheweb.org/sites/governmentontheweb.org/files/Government_On_The_Internet_Research-Report.pdf.
13.
Eynon,R., & Dutton,W. H. (2007). Barriers to networked governments: Evidence from Europe. Prometheus, 25(3), 225-242.
14.
Gauld,R., & Goldfinch,S. (2006). Dangerous enthusiasms: e-Government, computer failure and information systems development. Otago: Univ of Otago Pr.
15.
Henman,P., & Graham,T. (under review-a). Towards a taxonomy of government webportals: an international comparison of portal hyperlink networks.
16.
Henman,P., & Graham,T. (under review-b). The web ecology of the online state: the case of Australia.
17.
Hood,C. C., & Margetts,H. Z. (2007). The tools of government in the digital age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
18.
Jiang,J.He,D., & Allan,J. (2014). Searching, browsing, and clicking in a search session: changes in user behavior by task and over time. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval.
19.
Margetts,H., & Hale,S. (n.d.). Report on a user experiment: study of user expectations of a life events approach for designing e-government services. unpublished.
20.
Margetts,H. Z. (2011). Experiments for public management research. Public Management Review, 13(2), 189-208.
21.
Markey,K. (2007). Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 1: Research findings. Journal of the American Society for Information Science Technology, 58(8), 1071-1081.
22.
Mayer-Schönberger,V., & Lazer,D. (2007). Governance and information technology: From electronic government to information government. Boston: MIT Press.
23.
Mayo,E., & Steinberg,T. (2007). The power of information. London: Office of Public Sector Information.
24.
Moral,P.Gonzalez,P., & Plaza,B. (2014). Methodologies for monitoring website performance: Assessing the effectiveness of AdWords campaigns on a tourist SME website. Online Information Review, 38(4), 575-588.
25.
Nielson,J. (2000). Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis, IN: New Rider.
26.
Pang,P. C.-I.Chang,S.Verspoor,K., & Pearce,J. (2016). Designing Health Websites Based on Users’ Web-Based Information-Seeking Behaviors: A Mixed-Method Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 18(6).
27.
Rowling,J. K. (2000). Potter, Harry and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
28.
Shelter,P. (2015, 14 October). Announcing our work programme. Retrieved from https://www.dta.gov.au/blog/announcing-our-work-programme.
29.
Singal,H.Kohli,S., & Sharma,A. K. (2014). Web analytics: State-of-art & literature assessment. Paper presented at the Confluence The Next Generation Information Technology Summit (Confluence), 2014 5th International Conference-.
30.
Van Deursen,A., & Van Dijk,J. (2009). Using the Internet: Skill related problems in users’ online behavior. Interacting with Computers, 21(5-6), 393-402.
31.
Wahed,M. E.-S., & El Gohary,E. M. (2013). The Future Vision for the Design of E-government in Egypt. International Journal of Computer Science Issues, 10(3), 292.
32.
Wang,J., & Senecal,S. (2007). Measuring perceived website usability. Journal of Internet Commerce, 6(4), 97-112.
33.
White,R. W., & Drucker,S. M. (2007). Investigating behavioral variability in web search. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web.
34.
Zhou,M., & Society. (2013). A systematic understanding of successful web searches in information-based tasks. Journal of Educational Technology, 16(1), 321.
