CommunitySites was set up by Jack Latimer and Ian Grant, the founders of the award-winning My Brighton and Hove website.
My Brighton and Hove is a contributory heritage website, which means that people can submit words and photos to the site, creating an ever-richer picture of the city. For eight years, the vast site has been run by volunteers, and its high level of online contributions and record of sustainability are unique in the country.
Award-winning and sustainable websites
Over the years, we were contacted by other organisations wishing to set up similar contributory sites. By 2005, we could help them, because we had developed an affordable content management system that was strikingly easy to use, evolved from years of working with public contributors and non-technical editors.
Since 2005, CommunitySites has created dozens of websites for museums, archives and other not-for-profit organisations. Most of these are contributory sites such as Watford Junction. However, other organisations such as Warden Park school have adopted our content management system for its ease of use, even though they don’t want to encourage contributions from the public. We also create bespoke websites, independent of our software, such as those for the Mass Observation Archive and Panos Institute.