User satisfaction rates for government sites give a powerful message. Visitors to 24 of the government sites under study were invited to participate in a survey, and fill in a questionnaire which was linked to the site. Nearly seven hundred people did so. This is reflected in the lacklustre satisfaction rates returned by users. This rating was on a Likert scale of 1-5 where 1 is a very positive score and 3 neutral.
Sites vary greatly in the extent to which they meet users' needs.
Visitors to other sites have a much more varied range of expectation as is shown by their responses to the question asking for details of the purpose of their visit. A clear statement of scope and purpose of the site, and its intended audience, would go a long way to assisting users to identify where would be the appropriate place to find the information they seek. Audiences differ greatly between sites. The demographic profiles for users of these sites were quite different from the norm. Demographic data for respondents to all sites indicates that in general users come from all age groups, from ten years to over seventy, with a normal distribution peaking in the twenties.