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The  UK Government's Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 requires Parish Councils (PCs) to publish their operations on a website. Many councils rose enthusiastically to the challenge and a rich assembly of websites flourished.

Sadly, however, enthusiasm may have waned since.

While developing a website is fun, maintaining it subsequently is a chore. In the case of Parish Council sites, new information arises in a continuous stream and, once the original site developers have moved on to more exciting projects, the job of maintenance falls to individuals with less interest in technical matters and fewer skills.

Meanwhile, the range of skills required to deliver a professional website has broadened and deepened. Whereas in the past it would have been sufficient to produce a site that looked good on Windows desktop PCs, it is now necessary to cater for phones and tablets as well. This can represent a considerable technical challenge. At the same time, the range of government requirement has steadily widened. The latest iteration (2020) has introduced a demand for "accessibility". Websites are now required to be usable by individuals with limb and eyesight disabilities. These are worthy aspirations but difficult (and possibly expensive) to deliver. It is likely that many Parish Councils will opt to subcontract the work to commercial third parties.

The answer, in many cases is "simplify things". Many PC websites are just too complex. The job required by Government was essentially quite straightfoward - "please publish your meetings on the interet". But many Parish Council sites went far beyond the original brief by adding further functionality - parish history and news etc. There are better places to deploy this sort of information - Wikipedia might be worth looking at, for example. Significantly, also, these are places that are not subject to legal regulation either!

But if you see these matters in system terms, you might go further than that and ask, "if the information requirement for every Parish Council is the same, why should every Parish Council website look different?" Obviously, some Councils will want to be different but, for many Councils, working with limited resources and bigger problems, such an arrangement has obvious attraction. If these issues seem familiar, the parishouncil site may then be of interest. This provides, free of charge, a framework of code that can be used to create quickly a Parish Council website stripped to the essentials. "Accessibility" is built-in and templates are provided for some of the essential documents that the website must carry. A configuration and maintenance facility ensures that initial configuration and subsequent maintenance operations are delivered with an absolute minimum of effort.

An example of an operational website produced by the framework ican be seen at https://milburnparishcouncil.co.uk/. The style is austere but effective but the opening carousel provides sufficient "personalisation" to convey the character of the Council's community. Beyond this, the site provides a clear and simple mechanism for accessing the legally-required information. Basically it is just a curated list of links to reference documents (pdf files). Configuration and maintenance of the site is delivered by a s system tool that requires little more skill than the ability to produce word-process documents and turn these into pdf files. A description of this system can be viewed at https://mjoycemilburn.github.io/parishcouncil/

Details of installation arrangements are provided in the INSTALLATION_GUIDE included in the download package.

Organisations serving groups of Parish Councils may be interested to look at the closely-related parishouncils system at https://github.com/mjoycemilburn/parishcouncil. This enables individual councils to acquire the same facilities described in parishouncils but at lower cost and with less inconvenience.