The Waitaki District Council website will likely remain ranked as among the country's worst in the next Association of Local Government Information Managers (ALGIM) rankings.
Council policy and communications manager Fraser Liggett said the council's website - waitaki.govt.nz - ranked 65 out of 78 among New Zealand's councils in the 2015 ALGIM rankings, an inprovement in its ranking from 73 from the previous year.
And the planned new website - due to go live in May this year - would not be ready in time for the next rankings.
‘‘We will be working on the implementation of the new website and online services when the 2016 ALGIM survey is conducted,'' Mr Liggett said.
The council committed $155,000 to develop the website and online services in October last year.
The development of the website would cost $65,000 and ‘‘the implementation of online services'' $90,000.
To date, the majority of the costs on the website had been staff time, he said. In a report to the council's customer services committee council customer services group manager Richard Mabon wrote: ‘‘Feedback (on the council's website) is likely to get worse before it gets better.''
Month to month, November compared to December last year, there was a 6.31% drop in users on the website, there was a 17.28% drop in page views and there was a 10.89% decrease in the average amount of time users spent on the website, but between December and January this year, numbers improved: there had been a 24.9% increase in users and 20.9% increase in page views despite a slight decrease of 0.73% in the amount of time spent on the website.
Mr Liggett said the council expected website traffic to increase as the project was rolled out.
