An institution’s website has one main job: to publish documents and information in a way that lets anybody find them and read them. A council office, a school, a housing cooperative or a foundation does not sell through the site - it answers questions from residents, parents, members and donors, and some of them do it under a specific legal obligation. So different things matter here than on a company site: the structure of documents, digital accessibility, and whether your own people can post a notice at 3:50 pm on a Friday.
What has to be on an institution’s website
The obligations depend on whether you are a public body (a council office, a state school, a cultural institution) or a private entity with duties towards its members (a housing cooperative, a residents’ association, an NGO). The rules below are the Polish ones - the structure translates, the statutes do not.
| Entity | What you publish on the site | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Municipal or district council office | BIP (Biuletyn Informacji Publicznej, Poland’s mandatory public information bulletin), contact details and opening hours, accessibility statement, information about its activity in easy-to-read text and in sign language | the act on access to public information, the act on digital accessibility |
| State school and kindergarten | the unit’s BIP, its statute, admissions documents, digital accessibility, accessibility statement | as above, plus education law |
| Housing cooperative | statute, internal regulations, resolutions and minutes of governing body meetings, audit reports, annual financial statement | the act on housing cooperatives |
| Foundation, association, public benefit organisation | annual reports (or a link to the national reports database), registration data, bank account number, information about the 1.5% tax donation if it holds public benefit status | the act on foundations, public benefit legislation |
| Residents’ association, allotment garden, club, society | resolutions, fees, meeting dates, contact for the board | its statute or internal regulations |
One distinction up front: BIP is not the same thing as the website. The public information bulletin has a prescribed form and a minimum scope; the website is its readable layer for humans. You build both: BIP on its own address, the site linking to it from the menu and the footer.
Digital accessibility and the accessibility statement
Digital accessibility is a set of requirements (the WCAG 2.1 standard at level AA) that let a blind or partially sighted person, or somebody using only a keyboard and a screen reader, operate the site. For public bodies it is a statutory duty; for companies selling online, the European Accessibility Act added one from June 2025.
What that means in practice:
- Text contrast high enough to read it on a phone in sunlight - no more light grey on white
- Keyboard-only operation - tab through the menu, the form and the search, and see where you are
- Alt text on images, so a screen reader can say what is in the picture
- Headings in order, not bold text pretending to be a heading
- Downloadable documents with a text layer - separately below, because this is the most common sin
- Captions on video, if you publish recordings of sessions or meetings
On top of that, the accessibility statement - a dedicated page saying how far the site meets the requirements, what is not accessible and why, who to report a problem to and how to lodge a complaint. It gets updated once a year, by 31 March. A site built “accessibly” can stop being accessible within months of people adding content: a poster pasted in as a single image with no description undoes the whole job.
A housing cooperative website
A housing cooperative website has a mandatory public part: the statute, internal regulations, resolutions and minutes of governing body meetings, audit reports and the annual financial statement all have to be published on it. That follows directly from the act on housing cooperatives.
A sensible layout for such a site:
- Public part - the documents listed above, notices (breakdowns, inspections, bulky waste collection), contact for the administration office and the emergency maintenance line, opening hours
- Protected part - a member area behind a login: balance of charges, utility settlements, fault reports. Usually a module of the site or an integration with the software the cooperative runs its billing in
- Archive - documents from previous years filtered by year and by governing body, rather than a list of 200 links
The most serious risk is personal data in the public part. Minutes and resolutions get published without data identifying individuals, which is why I keep public and internal files in two separate places, with a short instruction for whoever adds content.
A school website
A school website has two audiences: parents looking for one specific fact in a minute, and applicants during the admissions season. The formal duties (BIP, statute, accessibility statement, admissions documents) are handled once, but the value of the site is decided by whether a phone shows the school calendar, office hours, the lunch menu and current notices within three taps.
Three things make the biggest difference in schools:
- Notices posted by the school office, without asking the IT person for help. If publishing requires going through an outside contact, the site dies in November
- Keeping the electronic register separate from the site - the register is its own system, the site should lead to it with a clear button rather than replace it
- Galleries with consent - photos of children are published only on the basis of collected consents, and the site needs a fast way to remove one specific picture
A website for a foundation, association or allotment garden
An organisation’s website sells trust, not a product. Donors, grant-givers and volunteers all check the same things: who is behind this, what exactly you did last year, and whether the money goes where you say it does. The minimum is registration data (KRS, the Polish court register number, NIP, the Polish VAT/tax ID, and an address), a bank account number visible without hunting, annual reports or a link to the public reports database, and a description of several completed projects with dates.
With public benefit organisation status, there is also information about the 1.5% tax donation - the share of income tax Polish taxpayers can assign to a chosen organisation - with the KRS number, in a spot nobody can miss in January and February. Online donations mean a payment gateway and donation terms, and that extension is worth quoting separately.
In allotment gardens, residents’ associations and clubs the pattern is the same, just smaller: resolutions and regulations, fees and meeting dates, notices about water and waste, contact for the board.
PDFs, the archive and site search
Institutions trip over documents more than anything else. A scan is a picture - a screen reader cannot read a single word from it and the site’s search will not find it. A scanned, hand-signed resolution is formally published and practically unavailable to part of the community.
Rules worth writing into the contract and passing on to whoever adds content:
| Problem | What to do instead |
|---|---|
| A scan with no text layer | A PDF generated from a text file, or a scan put through text recognition |
A file named dok1_ost_v3.pdf | resolution-12-2026-roof-repair.pdf plus a readable link title |
| A hundred links on one page | A list filtered by year and category, with search by title |
| A notice posted as a JPG poster | The content as text on the page, the poster as an extra |
Plus two things nobody sees: backups taken automatically and tested for restore, and a site engine that is kept updated. You find out about an archive of resolutions that cannot be recovered at the worst possible moment.
What it costs and what to put in your request for proposals
With me an institution’s website is usually a fixed-fee project in the range of 5,000-10,000 PLN net (Polish market rates), and where it lands in that range is decided by scope: a pure information site with a document archive sits at the bottom, a member area behind a login or an integration with billing software pushes it to the top. Domain, hosting and maintenance are counted separately - I broke those down in the pieces on website prices in 2026 and on website maintenance costs.
To get proposals you can actually compare, state in your request:
- The type of entity - are you a public body or not
- A list of documents to be migrated (how many files, what format, whether they are scans)
- The WCAG 2.1 AA and accessibility statement requirement explicitly, as part of acceptance
- Who will be adding content and how many people need access
- Whether you need a members-only area and whether it has to connect to some existing software
- The scope of maintenance after launch: updates, backups, fixes, response time
- The deadline and how acceptance works - with a checklist rather than a vague “to professional standards”
On a tight budget, the honest solution is often an off-the-shelf theme polished for accessibility instead of a design from scratch - I described the differences in a ready-made template versus a site built to order. Cutting on maintenance works out worse: a site with no updates becomes, within a year, a security hole with resolutions inside it.
Where I start
I start with a free diagnosis: I look at the current site or BIP, check the basics from the accessibility list, the state of the documents and how content gets added from the inside. You get a short summary - what is a formal risk, what can be fixed in place, and what needs a rebuild. No commitment.
For bigger work, a written quote with the scope and deadline spelled out comes first, and only then the start. After launch there is ongoing technical care in three tiers: Basic from 1,000, Pro from 2,000 and Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month - smaller institutions usually do fine on the lowest package, because the point is updates, backups and small fixes rather than continuous development.
FAQ
Is a website mandatory for a housing cooperative? The act on housing cooperatives requires the statute, internal regulations, resolutions and minutes of governing body meetings, audit reports and the annual financial statement to be made available on a website. In practice that means the cooperative has to have a site with public access to those documents, with personal data removed from them first.
Does a school website have to meet WCAG? Yes. A state school is a public body, so the act on digital accessibility applies to it, along with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard and the accessibility statement. A private school has no such duty outright, but with public funding the accessibility requirement tends to come back written into the agreement.
Is BIP enough instead of a website? Formally, BIP fulfils the duty to publish public information, but it is unreadable for most people and answers nothing like “what time is the office open”. The standard is a site for residents plus BIP as a separate service, with a visible link between the two.
How long does an institution’s website take? With the content ready, usually a few weeks. The longest part is not the build, it is collecting the documents on the institution’s side and getting sign-off from the board or council - which is why I separate the build deadline from the content delivery deadline in the schedule.
Need something like this on your side? I design and build websites for B2B companies - from scratch or as a rebuild of what already stands. Send me the scope and a quote with a date comes back.