NetWise was incorporated in 2015 by the current directors with the sole purpose of delivering website solutions to local councils around the UK. During the past six years we’ve gradually built our client base so that we now supply and maintain hundreds of websites to Parish, Town and Community Councils. We don’t design websites for any other sector.
Along the way we’ve helped our clients to comply with The Transparency Code, GDPR, and more recently The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility regulations (WCAG2.2) and we’re well prepared for new regulations that will be coming in the future.
When we first embarked on this project we had extensive web design experience, what we didn’t have was a wealth of experience with the requirements of a local council, as you can imagine however, many years on and hundreds of websites later, we’ve become specialists in our field. We interact daily with Clerks, RFO’s, Chairs, JISC and even the Government Digital Service. There’s little, if anything we don’t know or can’t advise on when it comes to local council website requirements.
Why Reinvent The Wheel?
The concept behind NetWise is to provide a website solution that satisfies every requirement of a local authority, to be compliant with every piece of legislation that the Council is required to, enable us to tick the box of every technical aspect such as SSL certificates, UK based hosting and backups in addition to providing every feature that a council will need such as uploading and displaying minutes, agendas and financials, keeping Council Member profiles up to date with register of interests and contact details. We even offer features that some Councils don’t even know that they need such as the Royal Bridge protocols.
We have a broad cross section of councils as our clients, some that receive large precepts and control a large asset portfolio and others that represent a handful of residents in the most rural of areas. It was our aim to deliver the best solution that we could to all clients, regardless of budget and that’s exactly what we’ve done.
How We Deliver Value
We’re fortunate to have a great relationship with our clients. This has helped us to understand their needs, their difficulties and helped us to solve their problems. The past few years of interactions and Council input has even helped us launch our latest theme NetWise V2. We are now confident that we supply the market leading solution for Council websites in the UK. The most straightforward, feature rich proposition, this has resulted in us being able to remove something that is traditionally time consuming and costly…
We’ve completely removed the need for the traditional tender process!
The tender process aims to communicate to the supplier what the requirements are for a specific process. In the case of a web designer that designs websites for many industry sectors this is a crucial part of the brief and quotation process. He’d need to be briefed about the features needed, the requirement for UK hosting etc and he may even need to learn how to handle gov.uk domains.
The process would need someone in the Council to spend a lot of time preparing a lengthy specification, before contacting several web design companies, asking them to read lengthy spec sheets and wish lists and then to complete lengthy questionnaires etc. All this takes time and money, typically the tender process and design brief can take around 20 hours. Depending on the design agency, this can equate to between £1000 and £2000 that will be adding to the quote. This isn’t the best use of public funds!
As we’ve previously mentioned, we only deal with Council websites. We therefore know the regulations that councils need to comply with, we know the features that they need, we know that it can take a couple of months to get payments authorised and we deal with Councils just like yours each day. By cutting out the tender process we’re able to offer a website solution that is tailored to your councils requirements, in fact it’s tailored to every council requirement in the UK. Yes it’s fully compliant, and yes, you can customise it to look how you would like, with your logo and images and colours, we can link it to your social media, you can create events and notices and news articles and of course you can add as many pages as you like! What’s best of all however is that we can do all this for a fraction of what it would cost if we had to sit down and complete extensive questionnaires each day, repeating answers to the exact questions that we’ve seen hundreds of times.
The Best Use Of Resources
Hopefully we’ve given you an insight into our business model, how NetWise can supply a website, designed solely for councils at a cost that belies its features. A proposition that we’re sure you’ll agree would meet with your taxpayers. Our website has a vast amount of information available to answer most presale queries, you’ll also find some reviews and countless examples of Councils that we already work with. In addition we’re happy to answer any questions via email or instant chat. If you prefer we can jump on a Zoom call. Take a look at our FAQ page for more information.
We look forward to working with you.
Steve, Adam and the NetWise Team
