The underlying system, Spanglefish 3 complies with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

As with any content management system, if you do things like use colours without enough contrast, don't add alt text to images or upload documents which aren't themselves accessible then your website won't meet the standard. But we're on hand to help you in making sure you keep your site accessible.

Web accessibility is constantly evolving - we do our best to keep up with all standards, but we are always happy to receive any advice on how to improve our system - feel free to use our contact form to let us know.

A website on our system costs £78 per year including an SSL certificate. This price is inclusive of VAT.

You might want to pay for some addons, like Plausible statistics or the dedicated Meetings calendar, but most councils are perfectly happy with what they get for the base price. For more information view our pricing page.

We would normally expect all Parish Council websites on our system to be on their own domain, whether registered through us or another provider. In rare circumstances we can host sites on a subdomain of ours, such as somewhere.parish-council.com. However there are good reasons to have your own domain instead.

Firstly, should you decide to move your website to another provider in future it will be much easier if you have your own domain. You can't take our subdomain away with you.

Secondly, it's a good idea to have your own domain for email purposes. (See next FAQ)

We charge £30 for a domain registration using a common suffix like .org.uk, but there's no requirement to register it through us - you can point your domain at our server no matter who it's registered through.

Although you can point the email part of your domain to any provider, generally, when you register a domain through a registrar, you'll use them to provide your email service.

If you register a domain through us then we'll provide you with a single email address as part of the package. However, it's becoming more important that parish councils have a facility to supply individual email addresses for each of their councillors as well as the clerk.

In the past councils have directed enquiries to councillors personal email addresses, or set up accounts for them on free services like Gmail. This is becoming a big problem though, because it makes complying with FOI or GDPR very difficult.

If say, an ex-councillor refuses to give you access to their email how can you be sure you're complying with an FOI request?

We can provide access to an email control panel allowing you to create addresses on your domain such as joe.bloggs@somewhereparishcouncil.org.uk which you then have control over if you ever need. We charge £30 per year for this service, and you can create up to 10 email addresses for this.

No. For more information visit our Technology page.