Council
Example of a Parish Council Webpage
Pariah Councils, Village Hall Committees, Resident Associations and similar organisations form a crucial part of community life. So often they have websites that have been built many years previously by a well-meaning volunteer, and although they are certainly better than not having a website at all, they are often difficult to maintain. They may not be mobile-friendly and they may be inaccessible for visitors with disabilities. Run Your Own Website is an excellent solution that meets these issues, straight out of the box.
Extra Accessibility
Parish Councils, like all other publicly-funded organisations, fall under the Government Guidelines for Website Accessibility. They also, like every other website, whether public or private, fall under the Equality Act. This means that if the website is not accessible for visitors with disabilities, they are open to litigation. Every Run Your Own Website comes with at least 4 different accessibility options. However, we also offer a more comprehensive accessibility option, for no additional charge. This has at least 8 different options to meet the needs of even more disabled people. You can see it on this page, top left.
Organising documents
Parish Councils usually have a lot of information to organise, usually in the form of downloadable documents. Being able to manage large amounts of information is important. They are usually grouped on a yearly basis. The documents are usually created in Microsoft Word and are formatted in a way that works well as a printed document but does not lend itself easily to websites. Often doing a simple copy/paste exercise onto a website will not benefit visitors to the website as it often appears messy or jumbled and difficult to read.
We recommend formatting directly where possible
We have always recommended that information such as Agendas, Minutes ad other similar documents are pasted in as plain, unformatted text and then reformatted for the website. The advantage of doing this means that the information is readily accessible to everyone who visits the website, regardless of the device they are using, without the use of third party software. However, this is not always practicable, in which case we strongly recommend you convert them to PDF format.
PDFs readers are freely available and the Adobe free PDF reader allows you to fill in forms and digitally sign them.
If you are using spreadsheets, you should not use Excel documents as they can contain viruses and will often be blocked by antivirus software should anyone attempt to download them. If they do not lay out well as a PDF, we recommend that you save them as CSV files instead. These are perfectly safe and will open in any spreadsheet viewer.
Example Parish Meeting Agendas and Minutes
Live Parish Council Websites
Please follow the links below to visit examples of Parish Council websites we have already created with Run Your Own Website Version 2. Please be aware that each link will open in a new window which will need to be closed to return to this website.