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2010 Winner: Salford City Council - www.salford.gov.uk
Salford City Council’s website at www.salford.gov.uk provides an informative and interactive service for residents. The site is maintained by a central team of three officers who also support 250 departmental content authors, who update the website as an adjunct to other duties.

During 2009, Salford concentrated on improving the standard of content, and pruned a considerable amount in an attempt to simplify the site. Stricter workflow controls ensure that content meets corporate grammar guidelines, and that all downloadable content meets corporate brand guidelines. Unique visitor numbers for the website increased in 2009 by 17% over the previous calendar year.

Salford could be considered an early adopter of Web 2.0  utilising social bookmarking, discussion forums, providing RSS feeds and integrating third party RSS feeds. Since public discussion forums were launched in September 2004, over 100,000 posts have been made by 3,286 registered members. It also reaches out to people via Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, and has seen over 800 images contributed to Flickr by members of the public. Its Twitter feed has seen an increase in take up with over 1,450 followers, and Salford successfully used the service to inform people about school closures during the bad weather in January. Election results were 'tweeted' as they were announced.

Salford’s website was one of eleven to be awarded ‘four stars’ in Socitm’s Better Connected 2010 report, and has now achieved the top ranking in the survey for the past three years, a feat only matched by one other council.

Judges comments: “..A simple, uncluttered and visually appealing design, impressive accessibility and social networking keeps the council on the web radar of its residents..”

Commended:
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
Westminster City Council
Broxtowe Borough Council
Exeter City Council