Parish and town council websites in Herefordshire, £47 a month

Herefordshire is a rural county, and many of its parish councils cover more than one village. A grouped parish council might take in three or four places, each with its own church, hall and residents who want to know what’s happening in their bit. A good website makes that easy: a page for each village, one place for meetings and documents, and a clear way to contact the clerk.

We do the whole thing for £47 a month. We write the pages after a short call with the clerk or chair, design the site, host it on our UK servers and publish updates when the clerk emails us. Up to 10 changes a month are included. Each agenda, set of minutes or notice counts as one change, and 10 is enough for most small councils. If you have a busy month, ask us.

Publishing under the Transparency Code

If your council’s annual turnover is £25,000 or less, the Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities applies. It asks you to publish items such as spending over £100, end-of-year accounts, the annual governance statement, the internal audit report, a list of councillor responsibilities, details of public land and building assets, and minutes, agendas and meeting papers. Larger councils, such as a market town council, are encouraged by NALC to follow it as a minimum.

We give each item a clear home on the site and keep previous years in an archive, so nothing disappears when the new year’s papers go up.

Training and advice for clerks

The Herefordshire Association of Local Councils (HALC) is where many clerks in the county get training and advice. We’re independent and HALC doesn’t endorse us, but if your clerk comes back from a course with a list of website jobs, send it over and we’ll help you work through it.

Old sites, volunteers and changing clerks

A lot of village council sites were set up by a helpful councillor years ago. When that person steps down, nobody quite knows how to update it. We’ll move your pages and documents across, rewrite anything out of date and set things up so the website no longer depends on one person. The domain is registered for the council, and the clerk’s email address is forwarded to whoever holds the job, so a new clerk just picks up where the last one left off.

Accessibility and documents

Parish councils are public sector bodies under the 2018 accessibility regulations, so the site should meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement. We build to that standard and write the statement with you, though the council stays responsible for its website and we can’t guarantee compliance. The most common problem is scanned PDFs of minutes. We’ll tell the clerk when a document can’t be read by a screen reader and suggest a simple fix. Our guide to writing a parish council accessibility statement goes into more detail.

We work by phone and email with councils across Herefordshire, from around Hereford to Leominster and the villages near the Welsh border. See our main council websites page for everything included.