Website traffic increases - Court responds to users’ suggestions

Posted to: 
Court
28/04/2015

Total hits on the B.C. Provincial Court’s website topped one million in 2014! The number of people visiting the Court’s website has doubled over the last three years, reaching almost a quarter of a million individual visitors last year. The site had a high number of repeat users - 416,510 – suggesting users are obtaining information they find useful. Combining new and repeat users, the number of individual pages visited by all users for all sessions (“total hits”) was 1,074,027 in 2014.

In December the Court re-launched its up-dated website. In January 2015 it began a regular news service, issuing short news bulletins at www.provinicalcourt.bc.ca/eNews and sharing more news @BCProvCourt on Twitter. Following these initiatives January saw an all-time high of 27,000 individual website users. February remained high and March topped January with over 28,000 individual users.

The website re-launch included an online survey of user satisfaction. Website Editor Judge Ann Rounthwaite said, “We really appreciate the positive response to our communications initiatives, and the time people have taken to provide helpful feedback. We’re working on implementing all the valuable suggestions website users have made through the survey.”

As a result of users’ suggestions the Court has already made website changes including:

  • more information and links for settling disputes out of court (alternate dispute resolution)
  • more “how to” links for Family and Small Claims court matters, presented in a more user-friendly way
  • a legal research primer to help people find Provincial Court decisions on the CanLII database
  • suggested wording for court orders under the Family Law Act.

Work is ongoing on other changes including making it easier to find judges’ names, having more judgments posted online, and making links more useful by adding descriptions of what the link offers. Judge Rounthwaite added, “Survey results show that people sometimes search the Provincial Court website for information provided by government or another court, rather than by us. We are working on an explanation of what the Court’s website does not offer, in an effort to help people avoid that frustration.”

The B.C. Provincial Court thanks everyone who has contributed to its efforts to offer the public useful, current, easy-to-understand information through its website. As the site evolves we welcome more feedback on it and on eNews.

Check out the website changes. Complete our website survey. Follow us on Twitter.

@BCProvCourt
www.provincialcourt.bc.ca