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

Shropshire has a lot of small parishes. Many of them have a part-time clerk who covers more than one council, works from home and fits the website in around everything else. That’s who our £47 a month service is built for. The clerk sends us an email with the minutes or the agenda attached, and we publish it. Nobody has to log in to a website builder at ten o’clock at night before a meeting.

The Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities

If your parish council’s annual turnover is £25,000 or less, the Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities applies to it. It asks you to publish a set list of items online, including:

• 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
• minutes, agendas and meeting papers

We set the site up with a place for each of these, so it’s obvious where the next one goes and residents can find older years too. If your council is larger than the £25,000 limit, NALC encourages you to follow the Code as a minimum anyway, so the same structure works for a market town council.

Where clerks get training and advice

The Shropshire Association of Local Councils (SALC) is the place most clerks in the county go for training and advice on what to publish. We’re not connected to SALC and it doesn’t recommend us, but if your clerk has been on a course and come back with a list of things the website needs, send it to us and we’ll work through it with you.

Accessibility for a small parish

Parish councils count as public sector bodies under the 2018 accessibility regulations, so your site should meet WCAG 2.2 AA and you need an accessibility statement. That can feel like a lot for a parish with one clerk and a few hundred residents. In practice, most of the work is in how the site is built, and we do that part. The bit that needs the clerk’s help is documents. A scanned PDF of the signed minutes can’t be read by a screen reader, so we’ll tell you when a document has that problem and suggest a simple fix, such as saving the Word file straight to PDF. Our guide to writing a parish council accessibility statement explains the rest.

We can’t promise the council is compliant. The council stays responsible for its own website. We’ll build it properly, test it and tell you plainly about anything that needs fixing.

Domains: .org.uk or .gov.uk

We include a domain such as yourparish.org.uk in the price. If your council already has a .gov.uk address, we’ll connect it. We can’t register .gov.uk domains ourselves, because only approved registrars can, but the Government Digital Service runs a Parish Council Domains Helper Service if you want to apply.

Working with councils across the county

We work along the Shropshire and Powys border and talk to clients by phone and email, so it doesn’t matter whether your parish is near Ludlow, Oswestry, Shrewsbury or out in the hills. For the full picture of what’s included, see our council websites page.