If you’re running a community group of some kind like a parish council, read on to find out how you can get a cost effective website for your organisation.
Challenges
Whether it’s a parish council, sports club, recreational society or faith group you may be interested in using the internet to connect with current and potential members. Getting a new website can be complicated though, with lots of questions around email addresses, website hosting, software and design. Your contacts may offer to help for free which sounds great initially, but can result in some odd ideas and could leave you in the lurch if they decide to stop offering that help.
There are free website building systems and low monthly cost systems available. You could get hosting and install WordPress to make your own site. Facebook groups can work well, but there are many privacy issues with platforms like that as well as them changing things whenever they feel like which can break things for you. Social platforms also give you ownership of your member list, so if the group gets deleted for whatever reason you’ve lost access to the list of members.
Approaching a web designer or local design agency can be tricky if there isn’t a decent budget available, as they may not want to take on a pro-bono or low budget project. There’s also the potential responsibility of educating and training users at site launch and ongoing, which might not be attractive to some web designers or agencies.
So… what to do with many options available?
Hugo Fox
A company called HugoFox provide cost effective pay monthly websites for businesses, charities and other organisations. Websites are run from a secure control panel and you can use your own domain name. Their commercial clients pay more for their sites, but community groups and charities can use the HugoFox system for a low fee.
Adding text, images and things like jobs, events and for sale posts is all taken care of with no coding required. Your site will work on phones and tablets too as standard.
Summary
We recommend you check out Hugo Fox if you don’t have the skills in-house or the budget to engage a web designer and need a cost effective website for your community group or parish council.