A guide on how The Web Orchard can support local councils
The Web Orchard supports a number of parish council websites through our Community Hub system. It is considered best practice for parish councils to use a .gov.uk domain name.
To help explain why local councils are seeking to obtain new domains and why this is beneficial, we have created the following guide.
Why should my local council gain a gov.uk domain
Local councils with a gov.uk domain can gain from a number of benefits including:
- A unique address to help people find the council website
- By setting new domain as email addresses, communication can be more easily recognised as from a legitimate and trustworthy by the recipient.
- Outgoing gov.uk emails are more likely to be cleared by security filters and delivered successfully.
- Separation of personal and professional communications - recipients will always understand the capacity in which you are emailing.
- You can control access to official papers and correspondence day to day.
- Local council officers won’t have to surrender private emails if you have a freedom of information or data request.
Choosing your domain
When choosing a domain, Local Government Town or Parish domains must contain the phrase 'towncouncil' or 'parishcouncil', or alternatively end in '-tc' or '-pc' respectively.
Please follow the below steps:
1. Review the details of registration here.
2. Request a registration form from The Web Orchard.
3. Provide us with scanned headed paper declaring that this is approved to register.
Once submitted, domains take between 5-7 days to register. We will then link to your Community Hub system – e.g. if your current domain is myparish-pc.co.uk then the primary domain will become myparish-pc.gov.uk. The old domain will remain in place but will auto-redirect to the new domain (as not to cause confusion for your visitors).
Alternatively you can register the domain through a third party (from one of these approved suppliers .gov.uk Registrars – Registrar Resources (nominet.uk) ) and as an existing customer we can link to your existing Community Hub (ie you do not need a new website to link a .gov.uk domain to). You simply need to specify the nameservers as ns1.stackdns.com & ns2.stackdns.com as part of your registration and inform us as to the domain.
Support available
Current Microsoft 365 customers once secured their new domain can request their email domain change as part of your existing support provision.
Local council customers with a POP/IMAP email are encouraged to get in touch about upgrading this to Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 is our recommended email system as it gives you a more control and provides all the auditing tools you need to respond to FOI requests.
Not an existing The Web Orchard or Information Solutions customer? Get in touch to find out how we can help and our range of website hosting and IT support services.