We build and look after parish council websites for £47 a month, with no setup fee and no contract. We design the site, write the words, host it in the UK and publish your agendas, minutes and notices when the clerk emails them to us. We build it to WCAG 2.2 AA and help you write your accessibility statement.
£0 setup fee · No contract · .org.uk domain included
The rules differ between England and Wales. This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Your clerk’s training, your county association, NALC or One Voice Wales can tell you exactly what applies to your council.
The Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities asks you to publish online, among other things:
NALC encourages councils above the £25,000 limit to follow the Transparency Code as a minimum, so most publish the same items.
The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021 requires community and town councils to have a website and publish information about the council, including meeting arrangements.
Parish, town and community councils count as public sector bodies under the 2018 accessibility regulations, so the site should meet WCAG 2.2 AA.
Book a free call and tell us about the council, the current site (if you have one) and what needs publishing. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re a good fit.
We write the pages, design the site, move over your existing documents and test it for accessibility. You check the draft with the clerk or chair before it goes live.
After launch, the clerk emails us agendas, minutes and notices. We publish them, usually the same day. Up to 10 changes a month are included.
A parish council website has two jobs. It tells residents what the council does, who the councillors are and when the next meeting is. It’s also where the council publishes the documents it’s expected to publish, from agendas and minutes to the annual accounts. Most clerks we speak to are part-time and already busy, so the main thing we do is take the website off their list. The clerk sends an email with the minutes attached, and we put them up.
The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 apply to public sector bodies, and NALC says these include parish and town councils. The standard used is WCAG 2.2 AA. In practice that means text people can read, pages that work with a keyboard and a screen reader, links that say where they go, and colours with enough contrast.
We build every council site to WCAG 2.2 AA and test the pages before launch. We also write your accessibility statement with you, which every council has to publish. We can’t promise a council is fully compliant, because some of that depends on what gets published later and the council stays responsible for its own website. What we can do is build it properly, check it and tell you plainly when something needs fixing. If you want to understand the statement first, read our guide on how to write a parish council accessibility statement.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) enforces the regulations in England, Scotland and Wales. If someone isn’t happy with how a council answers an accessibility complaint, they can contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
Most of what a council publishes arrives as a PDF or a Word document. The most common problem we see is a scanned PDF of the signed minutes. To a screen reader, a scan is just a picture, so it reads nothing at all.
When the clerk sends us a document, we check it. If it isn’t accessible, we’ll say so and suggest how to fix it. Often it’s as simple as saving the Word file as a PDF instead of printing and scanning it, or adding headings in Word before saving. For short items like meeting notices, we can put the text straight onto a web page, which is usually the easiest version for everyone to read.
PDFs and other documents published before 23 September 2018 are usually exempt, unless someone needs them to use an active service. So old minutes in your archive don’t normally need redoing.
A .gov.uk address isn’t a legal requirement for parish councils, but the Practitioners’ Guide recommends one. Only approved registrars can register .gov.uk domains, and we’re not one of them. If your council already has a .gov.uk domain, or gets one, we’ll connect it to your new website. The Government Digital Service runs a Parish Council Domains Helper Service if you want help applying.
If you don’t want to wait, we include a domain such as yourparish.org.uk in the £47 a month. You can move to a .gov.uk address later and we’ll set it up for you.
Plenty of council sites were built years ago by a councillor or a volunteer, often on a free website builder. They tend to work until the person who built them steps down. We’ll move the useful pages and documents across, set up redirects where we can so old links still work, and rewrite anything that’s out of date. If your current site is on a builder that won’t let you take the domain with you, we’ll help you sort that out too. Our switch your website page explains how a move works.
This is one of the main reasons councils come to us. The website doesn’t belong to the clerk, so nothing is lost when they leave. The domain is registered for the council, not for the clerk, the email forwarding can be pointed at the new clerk’s inbox with one email to us, and the new clerk just carries on sending us documents. Nobody has to hand over a password to a website builder or remember how a page was set up.
For most small councils, yes. A typical month might be an agenda, the minutes from the last meeting, a notice and a couple of small updates. Each document or update counts as one change. If you have a busy month, such as the end of the financial year when the accounts and audit papers go up, ask us and we’ll work something out.
£47 a month with no setup fee and no contract. That covers design, writing, UK hosting, SSL, backups, security monitoring, a domain such as yourparish.org.uk, email forwarding and up to 10 changes a month.
Yes. That’s how it works. The clerk emails agendas, minutes, notices and documents and we publish them, usually the same day. Each one counts as one change.
For most small parish and community councils it is. If you have a busy month, or you’re a larger town council with lots of committees, ask us and we’ll talk it through.
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA, test the pages before launch and write your accessibility statement with you. We can’t guarantee compliance, because the council stays responsible for its website and what it publishes, but we’ll tell you if anything you send us isn’t accessible.
No. Only approved registrars can register .gov.uk domains. If you have one or get one, we’ll connect it. Otherwise we include a domain such as yourparish.org.uk.
That’s common. We’ll move your pages and documents across, set up redirects for old links where we can and rewrite anything out of date.
Nothing is lost. The website and domain are the council’s, not the clerk’s. Email us and we’ll point the clerk’s email address at the new clerk’s inbox.
Yes, we can build pages in both languages. We don’t provide translation, so the council supplies the Welsh text or arranges translation. Check the Welsh Government guidance and One Voice Wales for what your council needs to publish in Welsh.
Websites for Shropshire parish and town councils, with the Transparency Code documents published for you. £47 a month.
Read more → PowysWebsites for Powys community and town councils, with Welsh and English pages and meeting papers published for you. £47 a month.
Read more → HerefordshireWebsites for Herefordshire parish and town councils, including grouped parish councils. £47 a month, minutes published for you.
Read more → CouncilsWhat a parish, town or community council accessibility statement must say, and how to check your website before you write it.
Read more →Tell us about your council and your current site. We’ll explain what we’d do, what it costs and whether we’re the right fit.
£47 a month · No setup fee · No contract
