Guernsey 2.0

The times are a-changing. BBC Radio Guernsey has recently dropped the 'Radio' from its name to reflect its 'multimedia' status (mostly because many people now listen online - not a seismic shift exactly but it's a great start). The Guernsey Press's archives are now available, so you can find out all about great historic u-turns. They are even on the verge of figuring out what a blog is. Soon, Rock Candy will be launched (apparently some kind of contributor-written online magazine - could be great, could be awful, we'll find out soon...) And WhyGuernsey, home of the new Guernsey enlightenment, have seen the light themselves and made their forums readable by guests and therefore, more importantly, indexable by Google.

We can now get stacks of local factomation online which just a couple of years ago would have involved making a trip to the Priaulx Library. People from outside the island wanting to get a snapshot of Guernsey life have it all laid out for them in full gory detail.

But if everyone from the traditional media down to the casual WhyGuernsey mud-slinger is embracing the Internet, why is the States of Guernsey's website so abysmal?

Just three weeks ago or so, the Treasury dropped a leaflet on everyone's doormat explaining how the new 'tax on real property' system will work. Some people who have opted out of junk mailings won't receive it, and some people who are affected might own property in Guernsey but live overseas, so they won't have one either.

Still, that's no biggie because they can get the information from the States website, can't then? Well, maybe some enterprising reader of this post can let me have the URL in a comment, but I can't find it anywhere, either by navigating the site (a maze of twisty passages all alike if ever I saw one), or by using the site search.

I've also been told that the Government Business Plan is there somewhere, but I can't find that either, despite being told by various politicians that this is a document of fundamental importance and the subject of the July States debate.

How can we expect Guernsey to have a presence on the international stage when the island's flagship official website is such a joke? Why aren't the politicians who fret about public apathy doing something about this?

The site urgently needs professional attention. Aside from publishing the Billets, what's there at the moment achieves very little more than paying lip-service to the notion that the States ought to have a website.

Sure, replacing it is going to cost money - but a little investment could go a long way in reducing civil servant time spent handling questions which could easily be answered online. And what price to ensure that the casual Google searcher gets Guernsey facts from the elected government, and not Guernsey mud from WhyGuernsey?