The Solution

We have designed this website to match the structure of  the model publication scheme. All the information drops into the website in the way that it is listed in your published publication scheme.  The Home page has an additional set of links that are often described as “Your area of interest” which provides visitors with quick links to regularly used pages and information that you want to give a high prominence.

You can simply publish information to meet regulatory requirements, from the Local Governments Acts to Transparency Codes, Freedom of Information Act, the Localism Act and much more.  The website provides general explanatory context to the information to make it accessible to the general public so you don’t have to prepare all the content.  The content structure includes the typical content for the Freedom of Information publication scheme which very briefly can be summarised as:

• Who we are and what we do including:
  • information about the council, its governance, the councillors
  • the activities, projects and duties
  • the involvement with the community as a part of council activities and social, cultural and sporting activities.
• What we spend
  • budgeting, accounts and value for money
• Our priorities and progress
  • Our objectives for the future, our plans for getting there and regular progress updates.
• How we make decisions
  • Council meetings and parish meetings and delegated decisions.
• Our policies and procedures
  • our written procedures and policies.
• Our lists and registers
  • asset registers and other lists.
• The services that we provide

In addition our websites are:

• a responsive i.e. designed for phones and tablets as well as laptops and desktops.
• automatically backed up to a secure data centre.
• compliant with government guidelines for local government websites.
• scalable, allowing your website to grow and cover additional topics and provide additional features as the council’s publishing ambitions grow.
• easy to update with notices, news and documents.
• easy to handover to a new clerk or administrator with step by step user guides.
• easy to add news, articles, images, photos and surveys, additional information pages much like creating new Word documents.

Once we have clarified your requirements we can add additional pages that are of community benefit such as lists of community organisations, services from the local authority and other public service providers.

We can supply stock images to add visual content but we prefer to use as many images as possible from your area to provide a familiar and distinctive visual theme.

For councils progressing toward the achievement of an award from the NALC Local Council Awards scheme we offer websites to complement the scheme. Click the open Council Website slider above to vew the additional content for each award level.