Community Council Websites

About 10 years ago I was a member of the Murieston Community Council in West Lothian. As a committee member, I looked at the possibility of having all community council websites on one domain. The benefit was to reduce costs, centralize and standardize development on WordPress, the world’s most popular website platform. I registered the domain communitycouncil.org.uk and offered a free subdomain and website to murieston.communitycouncil.org.uk. The format was easily duplicated for bellsquarry.communitycouncil.org.uk. The offer was not taken up by other West Lothian Community Councils at the time, I moved to Fife so the project lost momentum. Since then, the Murieston Community Council took on their own domain and hosting at muriestoncommunitycouncil.org.uk at their own expense, giving up the free registration I had provided despite my relocation. Bellsquarry lost interest, nobody updated the website so it also became redundant. Subsequently I did not not renew the registration for communitycouncil.org.uk and it is no longer available. I note that communitycouncils.scot is now in use and managed by the Improvement Service on behalf of Scottish Government. I see this as a missed opportunity to offer all Scottish Community Councils a free subdomain and WordPress website. If only they had made it singular! My guess is that communtiycouncil.scot was available at the time because it was only registered a couple of years ago. Sadly, it is no longer available.

A Special Meeting of the Council, held on 20 March 2025, agreed to a public consultation exercise on the proposed revocation and replacement of the current Scheme. In the first of the required consultations, the Council now invites suggestions and representations from the public on the draft scheme.

A draft document now exists for the Establishment of Community Councils in Fife

haveyoursay.fife.gov.uk/communities/community-council-consultation

emailing direct to cc.consultation@fife.gov.uk

The initial consultation process will be held over one 12-week period and shall address the Scheme itself, together with associated documentation, including Community Council boundaries.

Any person or organisation wishing to make written suggestions or representations may do so by no later than 5pm on Friday 16 May 2025 by;

I read that In order to fulfil their responsibilities as effective and representative, community councils
shall “Create a generic email address which will be published allowing members of the
public to contact them directly. The community council is also responsible for
maintaining its own website/ social media platforms in line with guidelines”

It’s possible to have multiple WordPress sites for community councils on a single domain using the WordPress Multisite feature. This allows you to manage all the sites from one dashboard and share plugins and themes. If Community Councils are to take advantage of the WordPress Multisite function, a suitable domain would need to be found to offer a standard, generic, safe email address for the public to use. It is important to give emails the best chance of arriving at their intended destination. Have you heard of DMARC, SPF and DKIM records?

All the suitable ones now appear to be registered, however, I discovered, the domain cc.scot appears to be available for registration as there is no existing WHOIS data indicating current registration. My search was inspired by cowdenbeathcc.org.uk with whom I have had meetings with recently to explore the possibility of using Mailchimp for a community newsletter. This was also something I implemented at Murieston Community Council and is still in use today to reach several hundred residents every month. With this domain, the subdomain address would therefore be cowdenbeath.cc.scot. unique (generic) email addresses (ref: 10.26) could be allocated accordingly e.g. info@cowdenbeath.cc.scot. I suggest each CC applies for a free Google Work Space on offer from Google for all 3rd sector organisations.

• Centralized Management: Manage all community council sites from a single dashboard. 
• Shared Resources: Share plugins, themes, and other resources across multiple sites. 
• Unified Updates: Update plugins and themes for all sites simultaneously. 
• Scalability: Easily add or remove sites as needed. 

Example:

Imagine you have three community councils: “Community A”, “Community B”, and “Community C”. You could set up your domain like this: 

• Main Domain:www.communitycouncil.org (This could be the umbrella site or a landing page)
• Subdomains:a.communitycouncil.org, b.communitycouncil.org, c.communitycouncil.org (Each subdomain would be a separate WordPress site for a community council)

Alternative Approach (Subdirectories):

You could also use subdirectories instead of subdomains, for example: 

• Main Domain: www.communitycouncil.org
• Subdirectories: communitycouncil.org/communityA, communitycouncil.org/communityB, communitycouncil.org/communityC

Important Considerations:

• Hosting: Ensure your hosting provider supports WordPress Multisite. 
• Subdomain/Subdirectory Setup: You may need to configure your DNS settings for subdomains if using that approach. 
• User Management: Multisite allows you to assign different roles to users on each site within the network, allowing for more granular control over who can manage what. 

Please contact me if you wish to register the domain cc.scot and set up a Multisite.