Which would you rather spend £2,500 on?
Let us assume you are a Parish or Town Council. You have to spend £2,500 on one of the following, which would be a better use of that money?
1) An Accessibility Statement which informs disabled visitors to your website of the areas in which your website does not meet their needs
2) A brand new website that fully meets the needs of all the visitors to your website, regardless of their ability or disability
We have been building websites for Parish and Town Councils for 12 years now and recently launched a brand new website for Knowsley Town Council, which can be seen by following this link. Knowsley is in Merseyside and they contacted us because they were very keen to work with a web design company that really understood accessibility. They had found us on Google.
Last year, The National Association of Local Councils (NALC), issued guidance to Parish and Town Councils with regard to their websites and accessibility for disabled people.
As you may be aware, websites in the UK fall under the equality act and have to attain certain standards in terms of access for visitors with disabilities. NALC stipulated some time ago that this would be something they hoped all Parish and Town Councils would achieve, or at least aspire to.
If they weren't able to achieve this then, as an alternative, they needed an accessibility statement which explained where the website failed to meet these standards and what they were aiming to have done about it.
I was speaking to a Parish Council last week. Their website was very poorly coded, it did not even have a SSL certificate and they had been looking for someone to write an accessibility statement for their current website.
They were quoted £2,500 plus VAT.
This is exactly the cost of our Run Your Own Council Website package, which includes converting the existing website to our format and training the council in running it!
I wonder which way they will go?
If you are involved in your local Parish or Town Council and you are interested in finding out more about how we may be able to help you, why not give us a call on 01243 952087 or send an email to hello@runyourown.website?
Clive Loseby, Access by Design. Award-winning web design, Chichester.
Helping you to Run Your Own Website!
