Parish Council Website Design
I recently had the opportunity to design and develop a new website for Bigbury Parish Council — a project focused on improving accessibility, usability, and transparency while creating a useful hub for the local community.
Key Features
- WordPress
- Kadence
- Events Calendar
- Document Download Management
When Bigbury Parish Council approached me about a new website, they came with a familiar problem: their community life was rich – council meetings, local events, community groups, a strong tourist industry etc, but their digital presence wasn’t keeping pace. Important documents such as meeting minutes and agendas were difficult to locate, residents struggled to find key information and there was little tourist information, which is crucial for this beautiful coastal parish in the South Hams of Devon.
Bigbury Parish Council needed a website that would:
- Make public documents easy to find and download
- Clearly communicate council news and updates
- Showcase community life and local events
- Be simple for council staff to update and manage
- Meet modern accessibility expectations
Understanding what a parish council website is actually for
A parish council website isn’t just a digital noticeboard. It carries a dual responsibility that’s quite different from a small business website: it must serve both democratic transparency and community engagement.
This means the site needed to handle two distinct audiences. The first is residents who want to understand how their council is working for them, e.g. checking what decisions were made at the last meeting, reading the minutes, understanding how public money is being spent. The second is the broader community simply looking for what’s on locally: events, groups to join, where to eat and shop, a sense of the place they live in or are visiting. Getting the navigation and information architecture right for both groups at once is one of the more interesting design problems this kind of project throws up.
The parish council website design we built
The Bigbury Parish Council site covers all of the following:
Council transparency and governance
Meeting minutes are available to download in a clean, consistently formatted archive. Other Council news can published in an easy-to-update blog format. The site makes it simple for residents to stay informed without having to attend every meeting in person.
Community news and events
Beyond the formal council business, the site acts as a genuine community hub — a place where residents can find out what’s happening in the area, whether that’s the village fête, church services or even wine tasting evenings! There’s an events calendar which the Council can update themselves and there is a newsletter sign up form that links directly to their MailChimp account. They send fortnightly newsletters to subscribers to publicise events and by placing direct sign up forms, we aim to grow their subscriber list. The parish also publishes a physical bi-monthly magazine and PDFs of all the issues are available to download.
Amenities
Want to know when the church services happen? You can find out on the church’s dedicated page. Want to know what’s going on at the village hall? Bigbury Memorial Hall now has its own dedicated page listing both the regular activities and one-off events that take place there, as well as how you can book the hall for your own function. There are also details of where to shop, eat, things to do and where to park. We’ve tried to think of all the information that residents and tourists might want to know.
Parish history
Bigbury’s history is important to its residents and so we gave this proper space on the site too, along with a page for the History Society.
The design principles that guided the project
Accessibility first
Parish council websites serve everyone in the community — including older residents who may be less comfortable online and those using assistive technologies. We built to WCAG 2.1 AA standards throughout, which is both good practice and increasingly expected of public sector organisations.
Easy for the council to maintain
A parish council clerk is not a website designer and doesn’t have the time to learn how to make a website so one of my primary goals was ensuring that publishing a set of minutes, adding a news item, or updating an event is super easy to do. It’s a job that should take minutes, not half a morning because if a website is difficult to update, it simply won’t be — and that defeats the entire point. I also recorded video tutorials for the clerk and other council members to learn how to perform the most common tasks on the website.
Mobile-first
People check community information on their phones. The site works beautifully on any screen size, which matters enormously when someone is searching for “what time is the next council meeting” while standing in the village shop.
Clean, calm design
Parish council websites don’t need to shout. The design reflects the community it serves — approachable, trustworthy, and easy to navigate without prior knowledge of how the site is structured.
Securing a .gov.uk domain — and setting up council email addresses
One aspect of the Bigbury project that often surprises parish councils is that the domain itself requires careful handling. The 2024 Practitioners’ Guide states that “community, suppliers and partners will now reasonably expect a local council to have a .gov.uk domain” and while it is not currently a legal requirement, the latest guidance contains increasingly strong language encouraging councils to make the move.
The benefits are:
- a .gov.uk domain brings robust security monitoring by the Cabinet Office
- emails are immediately recognisable as legitimate and trustworthy
- a clear separation of personal and professional communications for council members
Crucially, parish councils cannot apply for a .gov.uk domain themselves — the application must go through an approved registrar. As part of the Bigbury project, I handled this process on the council’s behalf: managing the application through our registrar and setting up individual .gov.uk email addresses for council members so they could conduct all official business from an official account, rather than their Gmail account. For many councils, this is an unfamiliar piece of admin that sits awkwardly between their clerk’s responsibilities and their web designer’s — I’m able to bridge that gap and take it off the council’s plate entirely.
What makes a good parish council website?
The result of our work together is bigburyparishcouncil.gov.uk and I think that with the close collaboration I had with the Chair, Deputy Chair and Clerk, we’ve produced an attractive and much more user-friendly parish council website.
This isn’t the first parish council website I have worked on. Last year I built a website for another local parish: Kingston Parish Council. Having worked on both these projects, I’ve come to believe that most parish council websites fall short in one of three ways: they’re hard for residents to navigate, they’re hard for clerks to maintain, or they treat governance as the whole story and forget the community dimension entirely.
The best parish council website is one that a resident can land on with a specific question — “when did the council last discuss the proposed development on the high street?” or “is there a walking group I can join?” — and find their answer within a few clicks. That’s a user experience challenge as much as a technical one, and it’s where thoughtful design makes the biggest difference.
Thinking about redesigning your parish council’s website?
If your parish council is working with an outdated or difficult-to-maintain website, or if you’re looking to create something that properly serves both your governance obligations and your community, I’d love to have a conversation.
It’s worth knowing that while there are companies who specialise exclusively in parish and town council websites, they tend to work from the same templates — meaning your council ends up with a site that looks much like every other council’s, with little to distinguish your parish or reflect what makes it distinctive.
What I offer is something genuinely bespoke: a site designed around your specific community, your location, your character, and your particular needs. The Bigbury site looks and feels like Bigbury — a coastal Devon parish with a strong sense of place and history — not like a generic off-the-shelf product. That’s the difference working with an independent designer makes, and it’s something a template simply can’t replicate.
Feel free to get in touch to discuss your council’s needs.
