Parish Council Website Designer

Longworth Parish Council

A bustling parish council in Oxfordshire

About The Project

Longworth Parish Council did not previously have an online presence, so this project involved creating a brand new website from the ground up. As an experienced parish council website designer, we worked closely with the council to develop a professional and easy-to-navigate website that clearly presents important information to residents. The new site provides a central place for council updates, meeting information and key documents, helping the parish council communicate more effectively with the local community.

A Bespoke Parish Council Brand and Accessible Website

As part of the project, we also helped design a new logo for the parish council that incorporates a rose, a symbol closely associated with the village. The website itself was carefully built to meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards, ensuring it can be used by as many people as possible. It also includes an accessibility control that allows visitors to adjust font sizes, change background colours and highlight links, making the website easier to read and navigate for users with different accessibility needs.

Easy Document Management for the Parish Clerk

A key feature of the new website was the creation of a clear and logical document system for storing council files. Agendas, minutes, policies and other important documents are now organised in a way that makes them simple for visitors to find and straightforward for the Parish Clerk to upload and maintain. This approach ensures the website remains well organised, compliant with transparency expectations and easy to keep up to date over time.

Project Details

Client Review

From the parish clerk

I am the clerk for a small Parish Council and have found Wingnut's help to be excellent and tailored perfectly to our needs. We now have an attractive, clear and compliant website. As a novice I needed help at my level and always felt that this was provided without giving me more information than I could cope with! The process of transferring information has been made easier by expert help, with great "how to" videos and quick responses to my queries. Thanks very much Wingnut!

Judy Roche

Parish Clerk

View more of our parish council websites

What you need to know

How long does it take to build a parish council website?

If you already have a logo and the content (words and pictures) to go on your new website, it will take approximately two weeks to build. We often find that writing the words to go on a parish council website often take longer than expected but we would provide guidance on this. Uploading of documents is normally a straightforward process and everything will need to be in PDF format.

How much does a parish council website cost?

Websites are quoted on a basis of how much work needs doing. A basic parish council website would start at £650 (initial setup fee). We know we are not the cheapest but strongly believe we provide a solid product, backed up by excellent customer service (see our reviews).

How do you edit the parish council website once it is built?

We’ll provide full instructions on how to edit the words, latest news posts, events, documents and photos on the parish council website as part of the build costs. For major changes, we can provide a very competitive quote.

Will the parish council website be WCAG 2.2 AA compliant?

The website will be built to conform to best practice industry standards for web design and accessibility. The website will also have an accessibility menu for increasing text size, changing background colour and highlight links.

Does a parish council website need to be responsive?

With over half of all internet browsing and searches done with a mobile phone or tablet, it is vital that a parish council website works on these devices. A properly designed parish council website should do just that and change its appearance depending on the screen size. All of our parish council websites work on all devices.

What SEO do you need for a parish council website?

To get found, your parish council website will most likely need to be on the first page of Google or Bing. This will require your website to have some search engine optimisation carried out on it. All of our parish council websites have the on-page SEO done while being built. Typically, there will be some good quality links to your parish website already, negating the need for any additional work to be done.

Can you organise website hosting and email for the parish council?

As a full service parish council website design company we provide a comprehensive range of hosting solutions for parish council websites. As well as hosting we can also look after email accounts for the parish council.

How do you make a parish council website easy to navigate?

It’s always a great idea to organise the website in such a way that is logical for anyone visiting the parish council website. We like to keep our menu structure simple and easy to use. This also keeps the mobile menu as small as possible. Having more than two layers is generally a bad idea for user experience.

What is a good domain name for a parish council?

The shorter your domain name or web address the better. The full guidance can be found on the gov.uk website.

We would recommend using the durmchapel-pc.gov.uk as opposed to durmchapelparishcouncil.gov.uk purely for brevity.

The domain name will not influence how the website is indexed on Google. We can provide guidance on this as well as the procedure for applying for a .gov.uk domain name.

What information needs to be on a parish council website?

Parish councils must adhere to the guidelines set out in the Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities. Which states the following information should be published:

All items of expenditure above £100.
End of year accounts.
Annual governance statement.
Internal audit report.
List of councillor or member responsibilities.
The details of public land and building assets.
Minutes, agendas and meeting papers of formal meetings.

Want to know some more?

Our parish council website design expertise

As a dedicated parish council website designer, we build WordPress websites that are simple to manage and easy for residents to navigate. Important information such as agendas, minutes and policies can be uploaded quickly by the Parish Clerk. Our websites are fully responsive and designed to perform well on phones, tablets and desktop computers. We also ensure accessibility features are included to support WCAG 2.2 compliant parish council websites.