The previous two posts in this series critiqued the statistics that journalist Paul Cullen was provided with when he enquired about activity on the English and Irish versions of State Websites while researching this article.  Many of the statistics seemed inconceivable, for example 1.2 million unique visitors to the Department of Social and Family Affairs Website last year.

Either Paul was not directed to the most suitable contacts, or the Web support teams in government departments were not able to convey the volumes of activity on their sites to non-specialists in a meaningful manner.

Paul’s article concluded with a quote from John Deasy T.D. calling the Official Languages Act an egregious waste of money. If the singular benefit of translating these Websites into Irish was to save costs by serving the 0.5% [sic] of the population that use the sites in Irish, it would be difficult to justify the cost of translation.  John’s short sightedness encapsulates the problems in the management of Ireland Inc.

As is true in many ROI models, there is an intangible benefit, aside from the straightforward benefits of costs saved and revenue generated. Ordinarily, in the private sector the intangible benefit is the value to the brand. In the case of government the intangible benefit is the greater good of the current and future generations that will inherit teanga na gaeilge.

As long as the government sites remain on separate domains it will be expensive and time consuming to support, maintain and measure activity on the sites.

Further, it will remain difficult, without great expense, to measure what portion of the population are interacting with the government on-line because of difficulties recongising visits to different domains as being by the same visitor.

It is not possible to operate a business efficiently if that business cannot measure the impact of investments in the business. The government cannot know what works and what doesn’t.

Ireland Inc. should develop a Web strategy with a view to eventually hosting all the government department sites on one domain, the existing www.gov.ie could be suitable.

The strategy should be formed at the highest level of Ireland Inc. and should be long term, covering the next 25 years. Once an overall strategy is defined and there is an objective to work towards, Ireland Inc. should not attempt to achieve the objective in an unrealistic timeframe. The work should be undertaken incrementally as time and budget permit.

A good start could be made with 2 weeks of work.

1. Give www.gov.ie a facelift with an improved design
2. Put doormats with links to each of the government department’s sites on the homepage.
3. Enhance the help section to assist people with directing their queries to the correct departments (much of this content is already available on the excellent Citizens Information site).
4. Measure activity on the site using Google Analytics.
5. Measure activity on the existing external sites using separate Google Analytics accounts in order to inform future decisions.

Over the coming years the Departmental sites should be migrated to the main domain as and when they need to be re-platformed.  All content should reside in a scalable CMS so content can be easily maintained.  New profiles should be set up in Google Analytics to track each Departmental sub-site in the same account as and when they are migrated.  In this manner it will be easy to source how many visitors have visited any of the State’s Websites.  It is not possible to know what technology changes are pending but at least as the sites are aggregated maintenance will be simplified.  Furthermore, Ireland Inc. will offer a better service to their customers at a lower cost.