A County website is a vital tool both for advertising guiding within your County and for communicating with existing volunteers.
It is important that your website is clear to navigate and follows current branding guidance.
Key areas to consider when building a website are:
- a direct link to Join Us (If a parent searches for ‘Girlguiding your County’ they are likely to be linked to your County website. A link to Join Us makes it as easy as possible for them to join Girlguiding.)
- news
- calendar of events
- contact us
- copies of County newsletters
- links to the Girlguiding website
- links to your Region’s website
- training opportunities
- information on your County team, eg who is responsible for what
You may also wish to include County documents, including your County constitution.
We do not recommend having downloads of forms on County websites. For official documents and forms, supply links to the Forms section of the Girlguiding website.
All websites must conform to Girlguiding’s safety guidelines.
- Avoid mentioning the time and place of unit meetings on websites, social networking sites or in chatrooms. Provide some way for people to contact you if they would like this information. You can then use your own judgement to decide whether the enquiry is legitimate.
- Register the domain name of your website under your local level. Domain names should not be registered under Girlguiding.
- Please make sure you provide a link to the ‘Register your interest’ pages of the Girlguiding website for parents and potential volunteers.
- If you are using photos of girls in your unit, make sure you have permission from their parents before using them, and avoid mentioning their full names. Please try to use photos that are in line with our branding guidelines.
- If you have taken any text, images, or code from any other website, make sure you have permission from the website owners. Girlguiding’s clipart and photo library images are copyright cleared for your use, but the majority of photos are not licensed for use outside of this website. If you would like to use any information or images from the Girlguiding website, please contact us beforehand.
- Please do not allow external advertising on your website. As you are unable to monitor content on external websites, you may inadvertently link to unsuitable material.
- Please visit the online community section of Girlguiding’s website for guidelines on moderation, online safety and community management.
Be sure to keep your website as up to date as possible. Check for broken links and information that has changed. A poorly maintained site could be bad promotion for guiding in your area. Girlguiding cannot offer technical support for websites.