Why I check every council website, every month, in public

I've built and improved websites for over twenty years. I spent five years in a consultancy delivering digital change for the public sector, worked with the States of Guernsey as it took walk-in services online, and led a team of twenty Drupal developers at CTI Digital.

The lesson that runs through all of it: most websites don't need replacing. They need a team with the habit of improving them. That's the method in the improvement plan.

In June 2025, in a webinar on bringing AI into Drupal, Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert described websites where agents make changes overnight, and you review them over your morning coffee. I took that as a challenge: build a system that checks council content overnight and writes an improvement report for editors. And spend as little as possible doing it.

Councils had something like this once. A national annual review had a team of researchers try key tasks on every council website and publish the results, until 2017. It was the one real outside view of how council content was working, and nothing has filled the gap since.

The first version used a cloud AI service and hit its daily limit within hours. Running a small model on a local graphics card was free but slow: one card would have taken about two weeks per run. So I upcycled second-hand workstations, added queues and workers so many checks run side by side, and moved to bigger graphics cards.

Each attempt cut the time: two weeks, then three and a half days, then sixteen hours, then eight. Today the checks run monthly on five servers I look after, and the assessments are written for council web teams to act on. Upcycled business machines are a little quirky, but they cost very little for what they produce.

What began as a side project is now my full-time work: a free monthly leaderboard for every UK council, fix guides for what it finds, and the improvement plan for how teams keep it fixed. When a team wants help, I offer reviews, training and coaching.