Success Stories

Not just minutes — Bramley Parish Council

Bramley Parish Council, in Surrey, has had a website for over 3 years. In addition to material relevant to Councillors and those involved in local democracy, the website has a wealth of other content targeted at community users. This case study looks at the decisions behind the creation of the website and the lessons learned.

Setting up the site

The first Bramley Parish website was a static site with 4-5 sides of A4 on a single page, which was updated annually. This initial site was driven by the need for the Parish to have email, and was set up using Freeserve as a provider of email and website hosting facilities.

The current site was set up 3 years ago, to improve content and make it more attractive to the community audience as well as producing regularly updated material.

Main aims

• To provide information for local people
• To promote the area to potential visitors
• To market the Village Hall, which is a key revenue stream for the Parish Council
• As a tool for Parish Councillors – with minutes, calendars and other useful tools

Domain name (URL or website address)

Bramley changed their domain name and hosting from Freeserve to Nominet. This decision was made because:

Using Freeserve as the host meant that ‘freeserve’ appeared in the URL and on all emails, and it was thought that this would be confusing to users.

Councillors wanted a URL that said more about Bramley Parish. They settled on www.bramleyparish.co.uk . When choosing a domain name, they considered .gov.uk, but this was rejected as too expensive at £60 per year. At the time, .co.uk domain names were quite easy and cheaper to acquire.

Costs

All costs were, and continue to be, met by the Parish:

• Set up cost of the website — £400one-off
• Technical support (local) — £50 pa
• Hosting of the website — £80 for 2 years
• Fees for .co.uk domain name — £15 pa

This does not include time costs for the regular updates.

Content

The most popular content on the website includes:

• Pictures – these are great for promotional work, and to give a sense of identity
• Village Hall booking information
• Minutes of Parish meetings
• Maps
• Links to Surrey online
• Neighbourhood policing information
• Local shopping information
• Links to travel information

Accessibility

Bramley placed high importance on the need for accessibility and consequently the text is large and the structure is driven by clear menus.

Maintenance

The content is kept current with regular updates. Time-sensitive content, including Parish Council minutes, are updated every 4-6 weeks. More significant changes are done as part of the paid technical support.

Lessons learned

• Don’t just focus your content on residents; visitors to the parish may also be interested
• Consider all the local resources residents may be interested in such as shops and travel, in addition to
• services such as Police, doctors’ surgeries etc…
• Links to other websites cost little, and can make your site much more useful
• Content that can be displayed graphically, like maps, make the site look pretty, in addition to being informative
• Use your website to increase revenue if possible, by promoting facilities such as village halls

You can see Bramley Parish Council’s website for yourself at http://www.bramleyparish.co.uk

Making the website work harder — Hook Parish Council

Hook is a large Parish Council in Hampshire with over 7,000 residents, which has had a website since 1997. This case study looks at the process of developing their website to offer increased functionality, and the lessons learned.

Setting up the Site

Hook realised that a website would be a great way of distributing information to residents, in the same way that local authorities use websites to engage their citizens.

Once the site had been established, it was decided to add extra functionality to assist Councillors as part of a programme including free laptops for staff and wireless functionality in the Council Chamber.

Hook’s original website was hosted by Hampshire County Council, but a decision was made to move to a privately hosted website. The council wanted a .gov.uk domain name and distinctive email addresses for Councillors. They also wanted more flexibility in producing and publishing content.

The new functionality includes

• A password-protected Councillor discussion forum
• The ability to perform detailed searches of minutes of Council meetings as far back as 1992
• The ability for those without technical knowledge to upload information, for example agendas for Council
• meetings
• Quicker decision-making
• Council meetings are now quicker because Councillors are able to ask questions and discuss issues relating to the agenda in the discussion forum before the meeting

Saves Councillors’ time

Not only do Councillors save time in the meetings, but they also have the ability to download agendas and minutes at home.

Saves the Parish Clerk time

As minutes and agendas are posted online rather than manually, this saves the Parish Clerk in printing off and posting the documents

Saves money

The costs of printing and postage are also saved

Future plans

Post Council documents like accounts and reports on the website

Undertake consultation via the website. This will involve publishing the Parish Plan on the website so that residents can look at it online or download it at home: this will save residents the £15 that the Parish would have had to charge for printing and postage of a hard copy. Residents will then be able to email their comments via the link on the website

Lessons learned

Local democracy has improved now that the community email in concerns to Councillors Councillors are better briefed when attending meetings now that agendas are sent by email and discussion can also take place in an online forum You can see Hook Parish Council’s website for yourself at http://www.hook.gov.uk

Reaching out to a wider audience — St Osyth Parish Council

St Osyth Parish Council, in Essex, has just over 4,000 residents, yet the number of unique users of their website per month is 6,000 to 8,000. The Parish Council believes that it is thanks to the number of tourists accessing the site, as the population of the Parish rises to over 20,000 people in the summer months.

This case study looks at how the website, which was initially designed just for residents, has grown to reach a much wider audience, and the lessons which others could learn from St Osyth’s approach.

Setting up the site

St Osyth Parish Council decided to set up a website as a new channel to access information about the Parish Council and local area. Like most Parishes, the website was initially created to report on the decisions and actions of the Parish Council and the activity of village organisations.

On analysing the user statistics, St Osyth found that non-residents were also using the site. This prompted them to include content useful for tourists and other non-residents, and take-up of the site has reached even greater heights!

Most popular pages

From 21st May - 19th June 2005 the most popular page was news, followed by the welcome page, and ‘About St Osyth’.

Benefits

• Increase in tourist knowledge and activity
• Independent means of promoting the parish
• Local people feel more involved in their community

Maintenance

Now that the site has been developed to include information that is of interest to tourists and other non-residents there are over 4,000 pages.

St Osyth has been careful to develop a security process for updating the site: Administrator access to the site is password protected, so only people with the right password can update it

Visitors to the site are encouraged to register. This ensures that emails and comments sent via the site can be replied to and gives St Osyth the chance to learn more about visitors to the site.

Lessons learned

Combining tourist information with resident’s issues made the site dynamic and interesting Monitoring visitors to particular pages enables you to focus on which type of content is most popular Local news is a very popular feature to have on a Parish website You can see St Osyth Parish Council’s website for yourself at http://www.stosyth.gov.uk

Supporting local parishes — Leicestershire County Council

Leicestershire County Council (LCC) is a large rural County with 7 Districts and 221 Parish and Town Councils and Parish Meetings. This case study looks at how the County supported the Parishes in setting up websites, and the lessons learned in doing so. Around 100 Parishes in Leicestershire are now online using the template provided by the County.

Setting up the sites

The programme was set up in the year 2000, and was initially funded by East Midlands Development Agency (EMDA), central government local Government Online (LGOL) funding and LCC’s own contribution.

LCC provide a template, hosting, training and support for Parishes. Domain names are generally of the form www.nameofparish.org.uk , with short names recommended. Email addresses are also provided in the same format.

Free service to Parishes

The service is completely free to Parishes and the domain name .org.uk costs each Parish only £40 for two years

LCC also pay for a server to host the Parish and Town Council websites, as well as village and voluntary organisation websites

Accessibility

The template and pages are Bobby approved for accessibility, and the appearance or colour of sites cannot be changed. The sites are Level 2 of the W3C accessibility standard and are therefore AA standard.

Key success factors - Involve Parish staff

LCC attribute the success of the project to the amount of communication they had with the Parishes:

The project was initially set up as a pilot with three Parishes in one district. When the project was rolled-out, there was then in-depth consultation with Parish clerks over what they wanted from a website and what support they needed. To ensure continued support and engagement, LCC recruited a Parish clerk who keeps abreast of issues and encourages take-up by Parishes.

LCC hold an annual networking event for webmasters in order to:

• Give webmasters an opportunity to discuss issues and share ideas with peers Reward webmasters who are doing well
• Show new technologies
• Get feedback about potential improvements to the template and arrange future training
• Provide training and maintenance Initial set-up of the website is done during a two hour training session. This includes training on how to post minutes and update the site. A lot of Parishes find that they can create the basics of a website during just these two hours!

  All websites use the same template, for ease of creating and updating Additional training is organised as Parishes need it and LCC provides support to Parishes who call in with questions

  Marketing

  LCC carries out consultation to find out what issues Parishes have, so these can be addressed, they regularly send flyers to clerks advertising the template, targeting Parishes who want to become Quality Parish Councils (QPCs). All the QPCs in Leicestershire have a website set up with LCC’s template.

  The template and support are free of charge, although LCC has found that free use of the template is not the main incentive for take-up, as this service is also offered by private suppliers who use advertising to fund sites Is offering the template, plus reasonably priced training and support, to interested Parishes across the country.

  Lessons learned

  • Provide email addresses using the format clerk@nameofparish.org.uk to maintain continuity during staff turnover
  • Ensure when a site is registered that it is for Parish use only
  • If graphics are encouraged, ensure there is enough server space
  • Counties should consider recruiting a Parish clerk to attend events and promote take-up. This peer-to-peer marketing can be highly effective in a local area
  • A simple template means that websites can be built by those who have only previously used word processing and email

  You can see examples of Leicestershire Parish websites, and the Leicestershire portal for Parish sites at http://www.leicestershireparishcouncils.org.uk.

  Parishes or local authorities interested in finding out more should contact Ray Smith (rjsmith@leics.gov.uk).