Village Hall Website
As I was saying I consider the Village Hall website pretty irrelevant. It has not been updated for over a year. The Wordpress version of the site is still active but is not visited by many.
There are a number of communication forms on the Wordpress site and only the "Contact the Hall" form is active. The other forms, booking for events, are still on the server but not linked to the menu system. This is mainly due to the lack of events at the Village Hall and the fact that I have not been asked to re-instate them.
The Village Hall executive seem to have lost any interest in the site (well actually it was only one who was in the first place!). The site says that the Hall is closed until final notice but it is actually open again. Also there has been an event, Summer 2021, but this was never advertised on the VH site and only on the Parish Council site.
Both the VH site and the PC site get so little traffic it is pretty academic whether the pages are kept up-to-date. I would hazard a guess that there are members of the VH executive and the Parish Council that have never accessed the respective sites.
Wordpress Forms
Although only the "Contact the Hall" form is active the forms provided by Wordpress.com are more than adequate for the use of the Village Hall activities. I spent a lot of time developing my own custom forms that incorporated checks for GDPR and the reading of "Terms and Conditions", but I abandoned this as I was getting no feedback on the forms. Mainly due to the fact that the Hall was closed and there were no events.
Hall Booking Online
This could be a solution for the future, the cost is £10 per month. There are many more features than I can provide and incorporate on the Wordpress site. There is an online calendar, online payments, invoicing and more.
The booking system can be embedded on an exisiting website, but this is a kinda moot point as nobody goes there!
Boxford use , or will use, this service.
If the Village Hall Commitee decide that they wish to continue with the Village Hall Website I suggest that either the Wordpress.com site is sufficient, along with the forms that have already been developed are used, or a third-party solution such as Hall Booking Online is used.