About this website
Originally set up in 2010 to support the Sibfords Society’s Domesday Project, The Sibfords website now aims to be of service to the Sibfords community at large:
- to provide legally required information about parish council business
- to keep villagers informed about amenities, organisations and forthcoming events within the villages
- to provide current information about local issues and conditions
- to provide a repository for historical information about the Sibfords
- to spread a little joy in an often troubled world.
The website does not provide facilities for online discussion and comment. However, many villagers find the Nextdoor social media site useful for selling and swapping household items, lost and found messages, recommending traders, commenting on local issues, etc.
The website is managed pro bono by the webmaster, Tim Huckvale. Apart from the webmaster, the website is primarily kept up to date by the Village Hall Booking Secretary, who ensures that all village hall events are listed in the Calendar, and the Parish Clerks who are responsible for maintaining the Parish Council pages. Village organisations may also be given editorial access to the website to maintain their own pages but, unless they are doing this frequently, they will usually find it simpler to ask the webmaster to update information on their behalf.
The operating cost of the website consists of fees for domain names and the hosting service. The total cost is about £100 per year and is split equally between the two parish councils. The domain names thesibfords.uk and thesibfords.org.uk are owned by Sibford Ferris Parish Council.
Apart from their own pages, the parish councils are not responsible for the website content. If you have any concerns or complaints, or suggestions for improvements, please address them to the webmaster.
The website was originally built using the Drupal content management system, but it became apparent with the rise of smartphones and tablets that a completely new “responsive” design was needed. The present site dates from 2017; it was built using WordPress and a custom theme, and is hosted by Zen Internet . The colour scheme is based on a palette suggested by Picular , derived from photos of local views. Our emailed newsletters are delivered by MailPoet .
Since October 2022 we have been using DALL.E 2 to generate copyright-free images to illustrate events and news items.
The website has been designed and tested to work well on the most popular modern browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Microsoft Edge, on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile phone. There are minor issues with the pre-Chromium version of Edge. The layout is weird on Internet Explorer version 11, but most features work in some way. It hasn’t been tested on earlier versions of Internet Explorer, and is probably unusable on them. Do please let the webmaster know if you are experiencing problems with viewing the website. Especially let him know if there is something you like about the website, or have suggestions for improvement.