If you shop at Sainsbury's in the London borough of Islington, check your till receipt. Not for the price of a half ciabatta, but for the message on the back. It announces: "You can now pay your council tax, business rates and parking fines online", at www.islington.gov.uk. If your next stop is the chemists, look out for a leaflet promoting the NHS's site, www.nhs.uk.

Yes, after spending hundreds of millions of pounds on e-government, Britain's public authorities have realised it is time to start shouting about it.

How much you hear about e-government depends very much on where you live. Some councils, such as Medway in Kent, have made a point of splashing their web URLs over municipal buildings and local media. Others prefer to let citizens find out on their own.

But is not just local authorities: the national police portal www.police.uk remains a fairly well hidden secret. Perhaps someone's worried about what will happen to the crime figures when we find out that it is possible to report non-urgent crimes online.

This may be about to change. Last month, a long-awaited national effort to develop "take-up and marketing strategies" got the go-ahead from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which is responsible for local authorities meeting the e-govenrment targets.

The scheme, named e-citizen, is being led by Norwich City council. It is number 23 out of 24 national projects set up to develop components of e-government for use by local authorities, mainly to stop them inventing 468 versions of everything.

Officials at the office say it was logical to leave the marketing of e-government until last, when there would be something to promote. But the project is going to have to work quickly to make much difference by the big e-government deadline of the end of 2005.

Officials told the spring conference of SocITM, a feisty organisation of local authority IT managers, that the project would look at new ways of selling e-services to citizens. But first, apparently, it has to find standard ways of measuring take-up. The project will be "delivering through the next 12 months", we were told.

By then, however, some councils may be pondering different questions. For example, what happens if e-government takes off on its own? If large numbers of citizens start to order public services online, councils may need to find ways of rationing demand. They may also have to take unpopular decisions about shutting down conventional channels, such as one-stop shops. While business cases for e-government tacitly assume the new e-channels will be paid for by shutting down the old, there are few cases of this happening.

Other hard decisions may include shutting down e-services that turn out to be unsustainable; digital TV, perhaps. It would be strange if the long-term task of e-government marketing was to persuade people back on to conventional services.

In the meantime, however, telling shoppers how to find their council on the web sounds well worth the cost of a few till rolls.