City of Canning, Local Council Website Rebuild

The City of Canning is a digitally focused council, who use their website to do more than tell you when to put your bins out.

To shape the City of Canning's future digital efficiency through web, we started by conducting a series of workshops identifying core needs, objectives, key internal users, external user personas and main issues with the current CMS. Using this in-depth information, we were able to clearly define a strategy to support the wide range of digital goals and unlock new and exciting opportunities.

We wanted a clear business case to explain why their current CMS (Sitecore) as a technology was not suitable, and what else would suit them now and in future. Previously they were using a CMS platform that charged a subscription fee on a user/traffic basis – making it essentially impossible to budget and in this case, an eye watering surprise bill at the end of a billing period.

Services

Digital Design

Digital Strategy

Integration Development

User Experience

Website Development

Technologies

Kentico

Discovery

We asked the people of Canning to tell us what they want

A key goal for the project was to leverage user insights and collect valuable data to help the city continue to transform their organisation with data driven decisions. Reviewing analytics and learning from insights, allowed us to understand the kind of user engaging with the site, and what information or features they were looking for.

It was also clear that the City of Canning’s internal team needed to have control of the site on a daily basis, and the more staff who had the ability to make changes, meant less content delays. Full training was delivered (and regularly conducted over time) to ensure that timely, new and relevant content was being added onto the site.

The website post-delivery would remain agile and that was something very important to the internal team.

The Dapth team focused on making the website user-friendly and easy to manage for staff. By highlighting key information for end users, we ensured that visitors could easily find what they were looking for. More importantly, the staff felt confident in managing the site. From bin days to ranger services and an easy-to-use CMS, this website has it all.

The project included a complete overhaul of the website’s user experience and user interface, information architecture advisory, and content restructuring. We migrated the CMS, uploading Sitecore content onto Kentico ready for launch. Additionally, we developed custom features such as an events calendar and online document management, provided website hosting, and offered ongoing developer support.

We are particularly proud of the migration aspect of the project, which saved hundreds of hours for The City of Canning team and helped them get their site live post-delivery. We transferred a significant amount of data to the new website with zero errors, exposures, or loss. This included 551 web pages (and their page SEO keywords), 2,085 linked documents, 125 news items/articles, 30 events in full, and 40 dynamic document listing widget instances.

Digital solutions

What did we love about this project?

Content workflows

No more content bottlenecks. Workflows helped to manage who can publish what to website, allowing departments to individually upload new content pages with administrators having the final say.

Version control

This allows administrators to roll back (or preview) previous versions of a content with a click of a button.

Form builder and database

The council can build new forms or edit then within the CMS, all form entries are saved and accessible online, or can be downloaded as an excel spreadsheet.

Administration interface

Kentico offers one of the most simplistic views of managing the ‘backend’ of a website, with the bonus of user roles controlling who can see what features (or make changes to).

User and role management

This allowed departments staff to upload or edit their own content areas, with main administrators having the main power to ‘approve’ and ‘publish’ or ‘request changes’.

Stable and secure platform

Kentico is highly secure, and this was essential for a local council within Australia.

Cost effective licenses

Kentico has an upfront yearly cost, that keeps budgeting simple. This includes all their features, and it does not require additional ‘plugins’ that are billed separately.