London Borough of Hillingdon website rated best in London

London Borough of Hillingdon's website has been rated the best council website in London and third in the whole of the UK by a leading website company.

SiteMorse regularly conduct surveys of hundreds of websites across the UK and look at various aspects including accessibility, reliability and performance.

Hillingdon Council's website entered the top ten of the UK's Local Government websites in October and has consistently been rising through the league during 2008. Hillingdon Council is committed to providing information and services to as wide an audience as possible as defined by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). Therefore, our website has been designed to follow web accessibility guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Fran Beasley, deputy chief executive commented: "Our web team have achieved a fantastic result which highlights our commitment to ensuring we are delivering the best services to the people of Hillingdon. The quality of the information we send out, and the communications channels we have available for residents to contact us, are of the upmost importance and it is good to be able to show our residents that we are achieving our aims."

Rob McCarthy, managing director at GOSS Interactive adds, "Managing a local authority website is a complex job, often with thousands of pages to maintain. And ensuring accessibility is a major consideration; whether it is coding the site with meaningful HTML to support text-to-speech software, or writing content in plain language with illustrations to support users with dyslexia or learning difficulties. GOSS iCM has several features, such as automatic validators, developed specifically to help organisations meet the highest accessibility standards as easily as possible. We are delighted that Hillingdon has been recognised for its work utilising the system and look forward to working together on future improvements."