Drumroll please … the Top 10 Court Website Awards for 2009 are here at last !!! This blog posting will cover the awards in general and a few observations specifically about this year’s contest. Here is a link to a downloadable press release for more information.

THE AWARDS IN GENERAL

First, we judge every court website we can find. Some courts self-nominate, which means we are ensured not to overlook a site, but we troll a number of sources to find every possible court website. Self nominations are nice because sometimes we get tips on website features that may not be readily apparent. For instance, last year Sacramento Superior Court (an unprecedented four-time winner) revealed that they were also hosting small claims e-filing features for neighboring court jurisdictions.

Second, we’ve been at this for 11 years, which is a long time in technology and Internet terms. When we first started this adventure in 1999, we looked at 300 sites – now we look at thousands. Accordingly, we have a distilled list of current and past winners that are a terrific resource for court leaders looking for superb examples of court website service delivery.

Finally our criteria for winning is a combination of interactive, e-government services with ease of navigation and aesthetics. We lean heavily to interactive content as our primary consideration, and with thousands of candidates even this must be done particularly well, across several court services or both.

THE 2009 COMPETITION

The most noteworthy exception to this year’s awards is the dramatic drop in the number of court websites we could find to judge. In 2008, we looked at approximately 4,000 sites, but in 2009 we could only find approximately 3,000. This leads us to the conclusion that court websites went gone through substantial consolidation last year.

For instance, the various court-related organizations in the Las Vegas area were winners last year partly because they created a Clark County Courts portal that originally consolidated the “front door” leading to each organization’s website … now the web address for each is the same (www.clarkcountycourts.us ).

To put this in perspective, there are approximately 16,000 original court jurisdictions in the US, not counting administrative law or federal courts. Some of these individual court jurisdictions, such as the various trial courts in Utah, are consolidated statewide operations that use a single server and web address for all courts. Others, such as the various court jurisdictions in Ohio, are governed at the city or county level and have individual web addresses and servers.

Our final observation about the 2009 awards is that the best keep getting better. Superior courts in California, for instance, keep improving their online service delivery, utility, design and organization. Consistent winners such as the various courts in Singapore, keep adding terrific features and functionality with each passing year. Even so, the mix of multiple with first time winners stays relatively consistent with half or slightly more than half the awards going to new court sites in this and recent years.

So follow the advice of Tom Peters, the famous author of the Excellence series of management books, who advises that when benchmarking to identify world-class practices and steal shamelessly. Sage advice, indeed.

Photo credit = Justice Served

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Court Management, Technology, Top 10 Court Website Awards.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.