Bedale Town Council serves the Bedale community as the first tier of local government, supplementing local government services provided by Hambleton District Council and the North Yorkshire County Council, and also promoting and representing the town with these and other statutory bodies.
Bedale Town Council originally approached us in 2019 for a website that would fit their requirements as their council is so large with so many different responsibilities. The site needed to be accessible, responsive, and completely compliant.
After 4 years having their site with us, it had started to become dated and quite daunting to navigate, both for site visitors and the council employees updating it. As the site has been in use for a long time, some of their content was also out of date. The site was also not utilising some of WCS' great features, as they were not released when their site was first built! The Council Staff were keeping the site well, but felt that some of the pages that had not been updated could do with a refresh. Therefore we have undertaken the Bedale Town Council as a Web Consultation project.
Utilising WCS Features
Add-Ons
Our Add Ons feature has proven a very helpful navigation tool on WCS websites. They can help link users to related pages, find information quickly, and can be used to display information in multiple places. Add-Ons are also edited outside of the page, in the Add-On editor. We chose to add any contact information that would display on multiple pages into an add-on, so if the member of staff or their details change, it only needs to be done once. We also created an Add On to display the date of the next meeting and its agenda. This means that the site admins only need to add this information to the site once.
Galleries
Often, websites have many images displayedwith no Alt Text, description, or responsive formatting. This makes the images not only inaccessible but also unresponsive to different screen sizes making them difficult to use the site on mobile devices. Our websites give you easy ways to add these simple yet important accessibility features. One of these ways is Galleries- Bedale Town Council have utilised this feature by adding their images into our Galleries feature, creating galleries with image titles, alt-text and descriptions. Our Galleries feature is responsive to different screen sizes, responds to image sizing, and helps to add different types of content to a site.