Creating and Maintaining a Website

These days it is vital that voluntary and community organisations, no matter how small, have their own website.  Unfortunately, it is a common problem in the voluntary and community sector for organisations to have a website set up but only one person has the skills to update it, and when that person leaves, the website becomes out-of-date.

Kingston Voluntary Action supports the VOICE system, which offers voluntary & community, public sector and education organisations a way of setting up a free website that is easy to edit, but that can also be developed to offer lots of useful features. VOICE is ideal for setting up a basic website, but can produce a more sophisticated site if that is what your group needs.  In fact, this website has been created using VOICE, which shows you what the system can do.

Sites built in VOICE can be edited from any computer with an internet connection and require no specialist web design or programming knowledge, so you won't have the problem of being reliant upon one person's specialist skills to update it.  Follow the links on the right for more information on the VOICE system.

As part of the Kingston Infrastructure Support and Development project, Sorrel Parsons, Information & Communications Co-ordinator, can work with your organisation to set up a website that meets your needs. This can be done either by telephone/email or through a brief meeting to discuss what features you want on your site and to gather information about your organisation. If you have an old website, we can move existing content over to the new VOICE website and will assist you to edit it until your organisation is in a position to do it yourselves.

VOICE websites are free. The only costs would be buying a domain name (can be as little as £2.99 a year) and training if you feel you would benefit from it (although you may be able to pick up how the system works without training). KVA runs VOICE training courses approximately every two months with a half day course for Beginners in the morning and the an afternoon session for Advanced.  The next course date is 16 May 2012.

If you do not want to move away from your current website, but still feel that you could benefit from advice on how to improve your website, we can also provide support on this.