When I was approached by my local Parish Council to update their website, I knew it was an opportunity I didn't want to miss out on. I grew up in the lovely little village of Lower Halstow, and was fortunate enough to be able to move back here in 2019 with my own family.
The website the Parish Council had was... functional... and that's about it. It was very basic and generic, and not particularly user-friendly; it definitely did not do our beautiful village justice. The Parish Council were under no illusions about how bad it was, and they were very keen to improve it.
I had several meetings with a representative of the Parish Council before I began working on the new site, where we talked about everything from style and content, to layout and accessibility. They wanted to create something brand new and for it to become the 'go to' place for village residents and visitors to find out local information and about facilities within the area. With this in mind, I suggested creating a Community Gallery, where local people can upload their own photos of the village. I also suggested installing a Business Directory, which local businesses that serve the local community can pay a small fee to have a listing that can be viewed by visitors to the website. The Parish Council loved these ideas, and even though I had essentially created more work for myself, I knew it would be worth it.
I also had to create a new blog for them, and create how-to guides for the Clerk of the Parish Council to be able to upload news, which can then be automatically distributed to everyone on the mailing list, and be shareable on social media.
The project was a complete re-build, but the building and design work was fairly straightforward, if not a little time-consuming because I had to download all of the agendas, minutes and documents from the original website, and then upload them to the new one! The new website was rigorously tested (and re-tested!) on different screen-sizes to ensure it would work on every platform and be clear and user-friendly.
We launched the new website last month, and it was very well-received by villagers and visitors alike! As with any brand new website, it is going to take time to build-up subscriber numbers and gain traction on search engines, but I'm confident that it will steadily increase over the next few months. I think some people had assumed it would automatically take the top spot in Google when you search for 'Lower Halstow', so I did have to explain that that won't happen just yet, unless they wanted to pay for a Google Ad!
It'll be interesting to monitor the website, and particularly the business directory, to see how they grow over the next few months or so - I'll keep you updated.
In the meantime, check out the before and after images below... or visit the new website and have a look around. And please get in touch to let me know what you think!
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