Congratulations to two parish councils in Uttlesford that scored top marks for their websites in a competition to recognise the good work of parish and town council websites in the county.

Hadstock http://www.essexinfo.net/hadstock was judged the best of websites which uses the www.essexinfo.net service and Wimbish for the best fully independent site http://www.wimbish.org.uk/

Winners will receive IT vouchers, a banner for their website and an award to mark their success.

Parish and town councils simply requested they would like to be considered for the competition run by www.essexinfo.net  Only web sites set up and managed by the parish council itself were eligible for the competition's two categories: one for sites created on essexinfo.net and the other created by councils and hosted commercially. Essex has 270 parish and town councils, including 52 in Uttlesford.

Entries were judged on presentation, content, interactivity, promotion of local democracy and innovation. A shortlist of four finalists were drawn up for each category with parish and town councils themselves having the final vote to decide which were the best. The results can be seen on:

http://www.essexinfo.net/websitecompetition/

The Best Parish or Town Council Web Site in Essex Competition is the first to be held by the Making the Links partnership, established two years ago to develop good practice in partnership working between the county council, EALC (Essex Association of Local Councils) and parish and town councils.