Charlbury town council

Wed 30 May 2007, 12:07

I'm not sure if "keep voting" is quite right - the Town Council has been uncontested in recent years, if I remember rightly!

There is a bit of a back-story to the town council website (or lack thereof).

There was once a Town Council site, way back when Ray Marshall ran the Charlbury website. When Ray left Charlbury, the website became disused.

A good few years ago, the Town Council asked me along to a meeting to discuss reviving a website. I don't have the exact minutes, but from memory, they wanted me to build them a website separate from the main Charlbury site - they were not keen to have their content hosted here - and were also a little dubious about the prospect of updating it themselves.

I did offer to have a go at building one but, sadly, haven't had the time. As this is now several years on it would be worth the town council investigating other options.

In the meantime, the Charlbury Website has expanded greatly and the community pages (which didn't exist then) would be an excellent solution, if only for the short term. I am certainly happy to consider adding more functionality to the community pages (for the benefit of everyone who uses them) if that were considered necessary. The big advantage of putting something here, rather than on a separate site, is that people already use the Charlbury Website - and if communication is to be seen as "getting the message to the people" rather than "putting the message out there in the hope someone will read it", that's got to be good.

One other possibility is www.wospweb.com, a WODC project which provides a free content management system for community groups. For what it's worth, I personally disapprove of wospweb pretty strongly: partly because I think it's trying to supplant local websites (like this one) and local web designers - of whom there are several in Charlbury; and partly because I spent two years at British Waterways trying to stop them wasting millions of taxpayers' money on a really terrible third party-built website. To me, wospweb seems similar, though on a smaller scale. (The Chipping Norton Town Partnership site is another example of this, but I'd suggest you peruse www.chippingnorton.net if you want to know more about that!) But given that wospweb is there, there's no reason not to use it, I guess: and indeed this is what the Chipping Norton Town Council do.

We do have some web-savvy councillors - some post here - and it would not seem unreasonable for them, or Roger, to update any site on an ongoing basis.

It's worth pointing out that the Town Council has been generally supportive of the Charlbury Website and did once offer a grant of £500 towards it. I chose not to take this up as I felt this would be too much of an obligation, both in terms of results and (more seriously) in accountability. I am very conscious that I've not built them a site, which I'd like to have done if I had too more time, so I would not personally attribute any blame to them for this.