The brief
Development, design and maintenance.
The NHPC website project involved a complete redesign and moving to a new platform in order to make the site easier to administer, easier to update and more user-friendly. A dedicated domain was also introduced.
Following the adoption of accessibility regulations for local government, the site has been designed to meet W3C 2.2 AA.
The old site
North Huish Parish Council had a site hosted by a third party with a generic domain and a path pointing to the NHPC. The templates were old fashioned and restrictive, with poor mobile compatibility. The site’s home page featured a history of the parish, and contacts were limited to a web form. Information was scattered: for example, to find the date, time, agenda and minutes for a meeting required the visitor to find PDFs in a document tree containing all the documents uploaded to the site.
The new site
The site was designed from the bottom up, with one simple question in mind: what do the parishioners want to know about the Parish Council?
The homepage is firmly rooted in the core business of the council. The top of the homepage features key information about who the Parish Councillors are and what the PC does. Because there is often confusion about which services are under the control of the Parish, District and County Councils, the homepage also contains direct links to the most commonly requested functions of all the councils serving the parish.
The list of parish councillors features photographs in order to be more personal, individual contact details and the register of interests for each councillor.
The list of council meetings has been streamlined, using custom coded templates to allow each meeting to be added and displayed in a standard format, with agendas, minutes and audio recordings all integrated.
Council policies and statutory documents have been separated and are clearly displayed.
There is an interactive map of the parish boundaries, a comprehensive list of the services the council provides and also an explanation of the services that it could, but does not.
As well as the new site, a new e-mail service was introduced to give all councillors a separate e-mail account on the council’s domain.
Certain features of the old site were removed, such as the history of the parish and information about church services. These are provided by external sites.
The site is mobile responsive, designed using the principles of the gov.uk design system, and administered through an open source content management system.
