Web Presence, E-Government and E-Accessibility. Local Government Capability of Providing E- Government Services in Albania
The web presence of public administration institutions is considered as an important channel to ease communication between them and citizens or businesses. Moreover, this channel is considered an efficient and effective mean of providing public services. Therefore, the accessibility of the websites becomes an important issue to ensure the quality of the public services offered to citizens and businesses. Many studies are mainly focused on the web presence of the central government institutions; meanwhile local government is playing more and more an important role in the provision of public services. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the municipal and commune’s websites, e-Government services sophistication level based on self-declaration, online survey and automated accessibility checking, using WAVE test tool. For this purpose 100 websites of local government units, including 65 municipalities and 35 communes of Shkodra and Lezha district were considered. The analysis of results revealed there only 38% of the municipalities have web presence. In most of the cases LGU provide a rich content, but not well-structured and user-centric. For most of the e-services is reached the first level of sophistication and only a few municipalities the second level of sophistication. Also, some websites provide the possibility of e-participation through surveys on quality of