Nelson City Council (NCC) is one of only five unitary authorities in New Zealand. As such, it combines the functions of city and regional council in a single-tier local government. NCC serves a population of 44,000 and has 250 staff and contractors. NCC's dual role means that their website must address a diverse set of audiences, including residents and ratepayers, visitors from New Zealand and overseas, businesses, and community organisations. Website visitors are looking for a wide variety of information and services, from council news and events to online services, such as paying rates or searching cemetery records, to communication tools for submitting to consultations or reporting a problem.
To address these diverse needs, NCC needed a site that is not only easy to use and aesthetically pleasing, but also reliable, flexible, easy to maintain, able to handle large amounts of content, and scalable so it can grow and be extended. Service delivery is at the centre of the site, with the website acting as a virtual council branch.
What We Did
- Migrated the NCC website from Dreamweaver to SilverStripe CMS.
- Created information architecture, wireframes and interaction design.
- Integrated visual design provided by third party designer.
- Supported Nelson City Council staff and their contractors in the integration and rebranding of legacy features such as a property database and cemetery records database.
- Customised a number of features to fit NCC's specific requirements, including an events calendar, a services directory, and a library section.
- Set up subsites which have their own visual style and can all be managed through a single CMS interface.
- Set up online payment facility for seven separate services (rates, parking fines, resource consents, etc.)
- Implemented a new search engine that produces highly relevant results, offers suggestions ("did you mean...") and displays smart excerpts for better context on the results page.
- Migrated all existing content from the old to the new site.
- Provided in-person CMS user training and tailored documentation.
- Managed deployment and provided ongoing support and hosting.
What Users Can Do Now
- More easily find information thanks to a revised site structure and multiple options of wayfinding. For example, for council services, they can:
- Look for a service based on their goal ("I want to...")
- View all online services at a glance.
- See a list of all common services.
- Find a service in the A-Z index.
- Use the powerful site earch engine to search by keywords.
- Pay for services online.
- Engange directly with the council through web forms.
Measures of Success
- A positive reception to the website from the other internal staff and the public.
- Work done for the council was contributed back into the open source SilverStripe project.
- Succeeded to meet initial goals of the project, which were:
- Fresh new design to get favourable reaction.
- Shift site focus to increased service delivery.
- Integrated subsites implemented.
- Capacity to add more new features and service delivery.
