World Wide Web Site Design and Use in Public Management

Abstract

The World Wide Web (Web) has been widely adopted by local governments as a way to interact with local residents. The promise and reality of Web applications are explored in this chapter. Four types of Web utilizations are analyzed—bulletin board applications; promotion applications; service delivery applications; and citizen input applications. A survey of 145 municipal and county government websites originally conducted in 1998 was replicated in 2002. These data are used to examine how local governments are actually using the Web and to examine the evolution of Web usage over the four years between the first and second survey. The chapter concludes that local governments have made progress in incorporating many of the features of the Web but that they have a long way to go in realizing its full promise.