Parish Council Website Designs
A range of website design approaches to complement your range of activitiesThe Challenge
The Freedom of information Act 2000 (FOI) requires that all public authorities publish information about themselves and their activities. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provides a model publication scheme to enable public bodies to be clear of their obligations. This is normally copied into a publication scheme prepared by each organisation which is annotated or linked to the relevant information. The publication scheme does not require the information to be published on a website but it is generally accepted that this is the easiest way to do so and so most public body websites have a “Freedom of Information” page describing the model publication scheme which has links to a hierarchy of other pages which ultimately lead to specific pages with the information to be published.
The model publication scheme provides a sensible perspective for understanding an organisation and it is a perspective that is used throughout the public services because every organisation is required by FOI to consider itself in these term:
- Who we are and what we do.
- What we spend and how we spend it.
- What our priorities are and how we are doing.
- How we make decisions.
- Our policies and procedures.
- Lists and registers.
- The services we offer.
In addition a website needs to be:
- Resilient; which means that it needs to be protected from deliberate or accidental deletion or corruption.
- Compliant; with Government standards
- Supported; i.e. for system updates and user assistance.
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.
Smart phones and tablets
Mobiles Overtake Desktops
Web browsing with a smart phone or tablet computer overtook the volume of web browsing by desktop and laptop computers in November 2016 according to Web analytics firm StatCounter. For website owners this means that it is essential that websites are designed for use on multiple devices
Multi-device display built in
