Four ways a council ends up with a website.
Three of them are how it is usually done. The question is never really which software is best — it is who can edit the thing next June, and where the council's records are when he cannot.
the four arrangements
No website
- The parish bulletin and word of mouth.
- A prospective member has nothing to look at.
- Hours are collected on paper in January for a survey due January 31.
- Minutes live in one Recorder's documents folder.
- Costs nothing, and costs the council every man who looked once and found nothing.
A rented vendor site
- A per-council licence, renewed annually.
- The content model is the vendor's. So is the interface, and so is the pace it improves at.
- Editing is usually one officer's job because it is the only one who learned it.
- Your roster and photographs sit in a system you do not control and cannot take with you easily.
- If the vendor raises the price or stops, the council's options are the vendor's options.
A volunteer's WordPress
- Usually free, usually good, usually one man.
- It is exactly as current as his year is quiet.
- Plugins and updates are somebody's unpaid Saturday, until they are not.
- Nothing in it knows what a fraternal year is, so hours and 1728A are still manual.
- When he moves parish, the council frequently loses the site and the password together.
Knightly Sites
- $15.99 a month, or $149.99 a year, for the whole council.
- Every officer edits every published thing, in a popup, without a webmaster.
- The fraternal year, the office slate, Faith in Action and Form 1728A are in the data model, not bolted on.
- Take everything with you, yourself, free — every record and every photograph, in one download.
- Cancel whenever; the records are kept for three months either way.
- One man leaving costs you one man, not the website.
We do not print other companies' prices or feature lists here. We have no current, verified figures for them, and a comparison table built on a guess is worth less than no table. Ask the vendor your council uses today what it charges and what happens to your data when you leave — those two answers are the comparison.
the honest part
Reasons not to move.
A sales page that cannot name a reason to say no is not describing a real product. Here are ours:
- Your site would answer at our address. your-council.knightlysites.com, not the domain your council may already own. If that matters to your council, it matters.
- Moving your old content costs extra. We will do it — news, photographs, documents — but it is a one-off job quoted separately, from $299, not part of the subscription.
- Every council gets the same design. Your name, your photographs, your details — one layout. If your council wants a bespoke site, this is not that.
- It is young, and it is one operation. This is not a company with a support floor. It is a working platform run by the people who built it, which cuts both ways and you should know which ways.
- You cannot yet take dues by card. The dues book and email notices work today; card payment is not switched on.