From the outside, a council website looks like any other website. It isn’t. The requirements that shape it — legal, procedural, organisational — are unlike anything a commercial brochure site has to deal with, and they change the job from top to bottom. If you’re commissioning one, or wondering why they cost what they cost, here’s what’s really going on.
Accessibility is the law, not a feature
Public-sector sites carry a legal duty to be accessible, and the standard is WCAG 2.1 AA. That isn’t a plugin you switch on at the end. It runs through colour choices, page structure, how content is written, how forms behave, and how the whole thing works for someone using a screen reader or navigating by keyboard. Build with it in mind from the start and it’s manageable. Bolt it on afterwards and you’re rebuilding.
Many stakeholders, one site
A commercial site usually has one decision-maker. A council site has several teams, each with a stake, sometimes several partner organisations too. Sign-off is rarely a single yes. The craft is building something that stays coherent through all those voices and doesn’t collapse into a compromise nobody’s happy with. We saw this first-hand on projects like Devon Climate Emergency, where a shared platform had to serve a coalition of public, private and voluntary partners.
Built for years, edited by non-specialists
Council content has a long life and is maintained by staff who aren’t web developers. So the site has to be genuinely easy to edit, hard to break, and structured to grow without a redesign every time priorities shift. That’s a different design goal from a site built to impress once and rarely change.
Procurement and value for money
Public money comes with public accountability. Timelines, evidence, clear deliverables, value that can be justified — these aren’t obstacles, they’re the environment. An agency that understands procurement makes the whole process calmer for everyone.
A council website’s job isn’t to look clever. It’s to let any resident find what they came for, on the first try, on whatever device they have.
Velocity Web has built for local authorities and public bodies since 1998. If you’re planning a public-sector project, we’d be glad to help.