Are you being served online?

Just about every community has a website these days, but that doesn't always translate into convenient access to information and services for residents. Some are still little more than glorified telephone directories, with little interactivity or other useful features, according to a review by Globe West.

The survey of 37 area city and town websites found that less than 60 percent allow residents to pay property tax or other bills online, read the minutes of Board of Selectmen meetings, or click on a link to send e-mails to specific town officials.

Even the region's best government sites remain far below the cutting edge, under standards applied by the California-based Center for Digital Government.

``We're looking for actual services online, not a form that you can download and mail in," said Cathliea Robinett , the center's executive director. ``Can you pay for services online? Can you get records online? Can you renew a license or get a permit online? That's what we're looking for."

Newton residents can pay a number of bills online, including parking tickets, excise taxes, and property taxes -- and they're taking advantage of the convenience, according to city officials.

``We've had over 33,000 payments since March of 2004," Newton City Hall spokesman Jeremy Solomon said. ``We've had $12.67 million in payments over that period of time."

The most active months for online payments over the last two years were March and April of this year. ``I think it's pretty clear from that the use is increasing," Solomon said.

Like many local communities, Newton is struggling to strike the precarious balance between making the site comprehensive and creating an unwieldy maze of information.

``That's a major challenge," said Solomon, noting that the city's website has been overhauled several times, including once in the last six months.

Sixty-two percent of area municipal web sites allowed residents to download forms, but few had any forms that could be completed and submitted online. None allowed residents to pay fees for such items as building permits and dog licenses.

Technology isn't the problem, according to Randy Perry , a founder of Virtual Town Hall LLC, a website consulting operation based in Portland, Maine.

``I think it's primarily the mentality of most people in government today," Perry said. ``Using a credit card means the town is going to have to pay the fee from the credit card company. Yes, but that cost is significantly less than the cost of face-to-face transactions when you consider salaries. Electronic transactions are more convenient for citizens, and they take less time for city staff."

Virtual Town Hall has built nearly 90 municipal websites in Massachusetts, including those in Hudson, Marlborough, and Wellesley, since it was founded eight years ago.

Virtual Town Hall charges between $4,000 and $25,000 to build an interactive community website, depending on the size of the municipality and the features officials want to include. The charge for keeping the sites updated with meeting agendas and other timely information averages about $300 a month, Perry said.

The company's platform allows public employees to quickly post meeting minutes and agendas online by e-mailing the text to an address that formats and posts the information automatically.

``Most town staff don't really understand Web programming, but they can use e-mail," Perry said. ``With this service, they can have it posted online faster than they can print it out."

At a time when most cities and towns are struggling to provide equivalent or enhanced services to taxpayers with fewer employees and tight budgets, the Internet can help bridge the gap.

``Electronic transactions are really the way to go," Perry said. ``Unfortunately, most governments aren't there yet."

Even with companies like Virtual Town Hall selling complete websites, some communities are choosing to go it alone.

Although it may not look as polished as Virtual Town Hall pages, Franklin's in-house website is among the most complete and functional in the region.

A scrolling text feature warns residents of road closings and detours. Residents also can view interactive maps showing the scope of ongoing and planned public works projects. And a new feature allows residents to personalize the site to show the links of most interest to them on the main page.

``Say you have a kid in the second grade, and you want to have his teacher's page and the school page and the weather shown right on the main page, you can set that up," said Franklin's webmaster , Les Barns .

During the last week of July, Franklin's official website was visited 31,264 times, and those visitors viewed 88,274 individual pages, according to town figures.

Barns, a retired AT & T fiber-optics technician and self-taught Web programmer, took over maintenance of the town site after serving on the volunteer committee that developed it.

``It's a big change over for the people who work in the town departments," Barns said. ``I'd like to make it even more interactive. It will come eventually, but you can't do it overnight."

By contrast, the in-house website of the neighboring town of Bellingham has only limited interactive functionality. The selectmen's agendas are not posted online , and there's no townwide calendar of upcoming government meetings.

``We're actually updating it right now," said Bellingham's town administrator, Denis C. Fraine. ``Our network administrator has been doing some work with it.

``Some agendas are online. It's really up to the individual departments to get that online."

Boylston's site, which is being redesigned, has been offline since the middle of last month, a town official said.

Dover, Franklin, Lincoln, and Wayland each have a lone portal for all municipal departments. But most area cities and towns have separate websites for police, fire , and schools -- often with radically different formats and navigation tools.

``Usually the smaller jurisdictions don't have a huge technology staff, but I've seen cities with less than 30,000 residents with very advanced websites," said Robinett, the Center for Digital Government's director. ``It depends not so much on the size or affluence of the jurisdiction, but on the people in the technology shop."

Lincoln's information technology director, Chuck Miller, said the town's website has improved dramatically in recent years, but he acknowledged that there's still plenty of room to add worthwhile features, such as a database of assessed property values and online bill-paying.

``A couple of years ago, it was a novelty, but now people's expectations are for much more sophistication," Miller said. ``Sometimes we're unable to do it because of security or the limits of my skill, or because we don't have buy-in from the custodians of the data."

Among the least-functional municipal websites in the region are those of police and fire departments.

Medfield's link to the Police Department sends visitors to a national police directory that lists only the chief's name and the station's phone number and address. The Needham police site tells visitors it is ``under construction."

Less than a quarter of the region's cities and towns posted daily police logs online, while no area fire departments posted their activity logs, the Globe West review found. The police log found recently on Wrentham's site dates from February. Some sites offer a link to the condensed and edited logs printed in the local paper.

``I think the reason for that, to some extent, is the lack of experience with the Internet in the upper levels of the police departments," Virtual Town Hall's Perry said. ``They have to enter all that information into a computer anyway. There's no reason why they shouldn't take that document and put it on the website."

The complete logs are public information, available to anyone at a police station, under the state's Open Records Law .

More than three-quarters of the country's Internet users, roughly 97 million people, visited government websites or e-mailed government officials in 2003, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The number represented a 50 percent increase from the previous year.

Robinett said people increasingly want to see crime statistics and school test scores broken down by neighborhood or, better yet, plotted on an interactive map.

In Westborough, one of the few local communities to post police logs online, Chief Alan Gordon said he's exploring the possibility of automatically e-mailing crime alerts to residents.

Top-ranking municipal officials aren't always as Web savvy as the residents they represent, Perry said.

``They just don't see the value of it, or they think the complexity exceeds the value." He predicted that residents won't stand for that attitude much longer.

``Five years from now, people are going to look at this as the only way to do business," Perry said. ``It's illogical to ask me to leave work early at 5:30 and go down and stand in line in Town Hall to register my dog.

``All we have to do is get people to recognize that just because this isn't the way we did it last year doesn't mean we can't do it that way this year."