Planning and Management of the Piacenza Portal

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The project to construct the Piacenza Portal was entrusted by Piacenza's town council to CRATOS.

The town council was recently joined in the project by two other bodies: the Provincial Administration and the Piacenza Chamber of Commerce. The project was one of several strategic projects intended to be carried out promptly as part of the "Pact for Piacenza". The idea is to build up a portal for the Piacenza area that will offer local people the opportunity to access various items of news about their town and its surrounding province. The main aim of the project is to make the most of the town and its surrounding area through the network, to make Piacenza known not only to its inhabitants, but also to anybody who uses the Internet to look for information about the town.

The choice of contents and the architecture of a portal dedicated to improving the availability of information about any town must be planned with careful consideration of the fundamental differences between the portal of a public body and any other type of portal: the criterion of public utility must always be of prime importance in the contents of the sites that make up the portal, as well as in the way the sites are organized into subject areas.

The first two stages of the project were dedicated to this end: during the first stage a census was carried out of all the existing Web sites and portals regarding Piacenza in order to create a "real" map, i.e., an initial division of sites into subject areas. The second stage dealt with the construction of an "ideal" map with which to pick out the macro areas and the contents that should be present in a territorial portal like that of Piacenza. The principle behind the organization of macro areas developed from a simple question: "which macro areas must be exploited the most in a territorial portal developed according to criteria of public utility?" This question was answered by picking out the major end-users of the information that the portal intends to deliver and, above all, by attributing to each subject area the distinctive characteristics that will satisfy the requirements of specific end-users. The basic criterion is that all end-users must be able to visit Piacenza and its province through the Internet with the same ease. Once the ideal macro areas had been picked out and the sites had been split up between them according to the subject matter, the next stage concentrated on an analysis of each site to identify its potential and any limitations. The quality control was carried out following some of the criteria for evaluating the quality of institutional Web sites suggested by Pasquale Russo and Giovanna Sissa in their manual on the application of electronic government for schools and public administrations. The criteria were the following:

1. characterization (index of immediate recognizability of a site);
2. contents (with the aim, amongst others, of verifying the completeness of the information against the aims of the site);
3. functionality (checks that the various functions work and are suitable for the aims of the site);
4. user-friendliness (including the principles of efficacy, efficiency and satisfaction);
5. accessibility (answering questions like: is it easy to find answers in the site?);
6. involvement (measures the level of involvement between the user and the Web site)and finally the level of updating.