Former President of the National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka, Sunil Wijesinha said even after 12 years of the setting up of the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) many Government institutions cannot get their websites running effectively and professionally.
He said, some of them do not work properly, some do not provide the expected information that the public wish to have, some have not been updated and several have incorrect English. “The Meteorological Department recently launched a new website which does not work. The ten-day forecast is of some forecast in May 2016. We are in December 2016 now. A few websites have Frequently asked Questions (FAQs) but some of them do not provide all the answers. In several websites the English is incomprehensible. Perhaps they believe in ‘English Our Way’. In many websites the links are wrong or the pages are still under construction,” he added.
“Why are the Annual Reports missing from these websites. Even when the Annual Reports are present they pertain to a period several years past,” Wijesinghe said.
He said, there are several exceptionally good ones too, and suggested that the ICTA examine all and get the inferior ones to benchmark the best features of the good ones. Recently Google has reported that Sri Lankans hold the record for browsing a particular word on the Internet. It is possible that the reason is that when they find the government website does not work or cannot give the information they are looking for, they get bored and browse for more interesting words.
“Therefore, if ICTA can get the government websites to work more effectively we will gain another benefit of losing the dubious world record we now hold,” Wijesinha said.