This government made websites the subject of one of its broadest of broad-brush targets when it promised that all services would be available electronically by 2005.

For local government, the state has provided all councils with some funding, on receipt of their IEG (Implementing Electronic Government) plans. The situation needed some work: in 1999, 40% the 467 UK councils at or above district size did not have a web presence.

Each year, the Society of ITManagement (Socitm), the professional association for locally based IT managers, examines council websites: its first report produced the figure above. This year, its Better Connected survey found for the first time that all these councils have a website.

But quality still varies widely. The best council websites are excellent: clear, user-friendly and rich in services. Wrexham (see below) among 10 given "transactional" status by Socitm, meaning they offer several kinds of service online, along with excellent information.

But a fifth of the UK's local authorities still have a website categorised by Socitm as "promotional" - essentially little more than an online brochure.

There is no parallel research for the NHS. However, there are fairly strict guidelines for trusts and other health service organisations follow, provided by the Department Health (see www.nhsia.nhs.uk).

The result is that NHS trusts tend to have reasonable websites, clearly laid out with plenty of information. Yet few do anything more, and the facility for electronic transactions seems rare.

The shining exceptions for the NHS in England are www.nhs.uk, providing a database of NHS services (see below), and www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk, which includes self-diagnostic tools, complementing the telephone service of the same name. There are equivalents for the other home nations. Wales has a small, equivalent site, and Scotland is building one.

Other sites generally link to these two, and it could be argued that there is little point in providing interaction on a local basis when these national sites do it so well.

But providing local transactions is possible. Netherfield House, a GP surgery in Seghill, Northumberland, allows patients to make repeat prescriptions through its website at www.netherfieldhousesurgery.co.uk. It is the exception, though, and many surgeries and health centres do not have a website, let alone one able to handle transactions.

Many central government websites are of good quality, and several provide online transactions, such as the Inland Revenue's online tax return service. There are also some poor ones, although numbers are falling.

If you work for the state sector, your organisation will almost certainly have a website. So why go further? Firstly, because about half of UK adults have internet access, and increasing numbers will use it in preference to other channels of communication. A shoddy website reflects badly, as would a switchboard that kept losing incoming calls.

Secondly, it can be a very efficient way of providing some services. Several councils place the same information on the website and their internal network (or intranet), and use it as a knowledge base for those answering the phones. And automated processing of transactions online is a particularly good way of saving money, if the service is used by sufficient numbers - that's why online banks offer better interest rates. People will use such services: Wrexham county borough council has taken around £61,000 in payments through its website during April, May, June and July, for a service it started in November last year.

Thirdly, there is specific pressure from the new Disability Discrimination Act to improve websites. Part four of the act will make it a requirement that public sector websites are accessible to all.

Robin Christopherson, web consultancy manager for IT accessibility charity AbilityNet, says the business case is at least as strong as the legal case. "There's certainly huge scope for bad PR," he says.

And making a site accessible - this primarily means for the visually impaired - tends to be good for all users.

A minimum requirement is to provide advice on accessibility, such as on increasing the size of type within a browser - AbilityNet's website has advice at www.ability net.org.uk - and to use ALT tags (textual alternatives to pictures and images that can be read out by a screen-reader).

Christopherson says investing in such software, such as IBM's Home Page Reader, allows designers to check their site is accessible to the visually impaired.

But you don't need to tear everything down and start again. "The Act is about reasonable adjustment," says Christopherson. "The one thing that is inexcusable is not to have a plan. The very least you can say is, we know the scale of the problem and here is our plan to solve it."

Evidence suggests that well-designed sites can pull in more visitors. Socitm's Better Connected survey used website traffic data from internet service providers to calculate "visits per head of population" for all local authority websites. The top 30 included 16 of Socitm's top sites - these comprise just 10% of local authorities.

"There's definitely a correlation between those which are well-used and those which are well-developed," says Martin Greenwood, editor of the Better Connected report. "If there's a poor structure, or the information is out-of-date, people won't return."

This is clear when comparing like with like. Tameside metropolitan borough council, which has one of the best local authority websites, has seven times the usage of the least-used metropolitan district site in the north-west. The London borough of Brent, another top-rated site, has five times the usage of the least-used London borough.

And if you have a site, you might as well have a popular one. The cost per extra visit is very small, compared with other kinds of communication such as printed material or phone calls - although there is little worse than promoting a website and then not having the web server capacity to deal with its popularity.

However, this is more likely to be a problem for national sites such as the Environment Agency's hazard mapping service or the Public Records Office's 1901 Census, both of which were inundated with requests on their high-profile openings.

There is help available. Tameside (www.tameside.gov.uk), the first council to meet the government target to offer all its services electronically, has offered advice and software to other councils. Aplaws (www.aplaws.org.uk) offers a free content management system to all UK local authorities. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister provides information on pathfinder websites at the following site: www.lgolpathfinder.gov.uk. NHS bodies are encouraged to turn to the NHS Information Authority for guidance.

And online, it is very easy to see how others do what they do. Just bear in mind that everyone else can see what you are doing as well - something of a motivational factor in itself.

Four websites

Good

Wrexham metropolitan borough council
www.wrexham.gov.uk/english/
The home-page is simply designed, with dark text on a white background, but with splashes of colour. On the left there are links to the site's main sections, as well as links to other state bodies such as UK Online and the Welsh Assembly.

In the top right, the red "Cymraeg" links to a version of this page in Welsh: one in seven locals speak as their first language. Every page on the site has a Welsh version, with similar "English" link.

The domain name is obvious: www.wrexham.gov.uk/english/. This takes you to a page offering either English or Welsh home-pages. The council also owns www.wrecsam.gov.uk, the Welsh for Wrexham, which takes you straight to the Welsh language home-page.

The site accepts online payments for council and local utility bills, along with numerous reporting services such as of fly-tipping and street-lighting problems, through the "Online Facilities" link.

The right-hand side includes a map showing Wrexham's location - recommended practice. Below that, job vacancies for council sites, is clearly linked. One of the few drawbacks is that you need to scroll to get to the council's address and telephone number at the bottom of the homepage.

The apparently blank top-left corner of each page includes a white-on-white internal link to the page's contents. This allows people using screen-reading software to jump to the contents, without going through the bars on top and left which appear on every page. This and other features meant Wrexham was the first local authority to get the Royal National Institute for the Blind's See it Right award.

Bad

Hartlepool borough council
www.hartlepool.gov.uk
It may be pretty, but is it functional? Not according to this year's Socitm survey, which gave it the lowest mark of any major local authority.

This is partly due to a lack of transactional facilities, but several problems are visible here on the home-page, which is more than 100kb in size, making it slow to download on a normal modem. The home-page offers no information and there is no search facility or site-map.

The site uses a technique known as "frames", which means every page appears to be www.hartlepool.gov.uk, so you can't bookmark internal pages.

This would be fine for a small business, but not for a unitary local authority. The city is currently working on a replacement which should be available in the autumn.

Good

NHS gateway site
www.nhs.uk
This has a simple, clear design. One of the most prominent features answers the question "Are you feeling ill?" with a link to the website for NHS Direct, but also its phone number in big clear numerals.

The top right has the site's most useful feature: its directory of GPs, hospitals, chemists, dentists, opticians and walk-in centres. This includes contact details, in some cases opening hours, and for dentists, policy on taking NHS patients. There are links to a full-page version of this search facility at the left-hand side and at the bottom of the page.

The "story" in the centre of the site, here about modern matrons, changes every few weeks providing a reason to return. There are also links to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish NHS gateways. And you can't beat this for a domain name.

Bad

The Security Service (MI5)
www.mi5.gov.uk
At least MI5 has a website: its sister organisation MI6 remains offline. The problems here are of design. The home-page is almost 100kb in size, with big pictures slowing its download time. The title of every page is Home_MI5, particularly annoying for a user of the search facility.

The page is rendered badly in browsers other than Explorer. It also demonstrates another problem: unlike the NHS site, the home-page is much taller than it is wide.

How to design a site

· Web pages should be reasonably-sized. The government's Guidelines for UK Government Websites says home pages should be less than 40 kilobytes, although research by the web monitoring service NexusWatch found the average is 69k. Anything more than 100k is pushing it. This primarily means keep the images small.

· Keep the overall design of the page pretty simple - black on white is absolutely fine, it works for BBC News (and the Guardian). Avoid animation and sound except in special circumstances. Sans-serif fonts such as Arial or Verdana are easier to read.

· Any state-sector site should link to other parts of the public sector, and to www.ukonline.gov.uk (the government's central website). A council should consider linking to other levels of local government - the national assemblies, or a district's county council - and to neighbouring authorities. An English NHS site should link to www.nhs.uk and NHS Direct Online (www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk), as well as other local NHS organisations.

· Check the site works with different browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer may dominate the market, but there are plenty of users of Netscape and Opera. Your site should work reasonably on all three.

· Include ALT tags for images. You can see these if you turn off images on your browser, or in some browsers, if you rest the cursor over an image - they describe what is in the image. They are vital for use by the visually impaired.

· Providing translated versions of pages is desirable in areas with strong use of languages other than English.

· Provide accessibility and user preference information. AbilityNet can help with this - see main text.

· Provide a search engine facility that works. This means special software, and staff time analysing the results. If people are regularly searching for a certain subject, it may need a link from the home page. Also, provide an A to Z list of services with multiple entries - "waste" as well as "refuse", for example. If words keep cropping up in the search engine, put them on this list too. A site map is also useful.

· Update the site regularly, at least every few weeks. This gives people a reason to visit again.

· Use proper domain names. Local authorities are entitled to names ending with .gov.uk and NHS organisations are entitled to names ending .nhs.uk. As these are only issued to government and NHS bodies respectively, these establish your credibility. The NHS has strict naming conventions - see www.addressing.nhs.uk - but local government does not. If your council is not using the most obvious name - ie www.manchester.gov.uk - consider changing to this name, or at least obtaining it as another way to your site.

· For any site beyond an online brochure, static pages (the kind designed in desktop publishing-style software) are likely to be too inflexible, as they require web-page design staff to make all changes. Instead, consider content management software allowing departmental staff to edit pages by altering a database.

· For more information, go to: Socitm, www.socitm.gov.uk - publisher of the Better Connected survey. The NHS Information Authority - www.nhsia.nhs.uk - provides guidelines on NHS IT, including websites.

AbilityNet: www.abilitynet.org.uk - provides free advice on making IT accessible to all, as well as paid-for consultancy.

W3C: www.w3.org/wai - the World Wide Web Consortium is the nearest thing the web has to a governing body. This part of its site offers guidelines on good practice in web design.

Bobby: bobby.watchfire.com/ - an automated service that checks pages for compliance with some of the W3C guidelines.