Since launching the new WALGA website in 2015, our team were tasked to give it a facelift 6 years later. We also took the opportunity to upgrade their CMS from Kentico Xperience version 11 to version 12. This saved considerable management costs, as well as enabled WALGA to focus on their online service offering where local councils could access resources by subscribing and becoming a member of WALGA.
In 2021 our team revisited the website design, tasked with designed a new look for the website to enable a simple yet corporate user experience for local government and corporate users.
Reducing page templates and increasing the use of widgets
WALGA had near 3000 content pieces and data types combined. In order to offer a sustainable transition moving forward, we shifted from the previous 20 templates to a handful, with a combination of new widgets. This had to be done in a delicate manner, with so much content already on the site with complex functionality, our user experience designers had to ensure that the current content was mapped into similar 'zones' in the new template. This meant 'content zone A' needed to also exist in the new proposed template. Our developers could then simply push old content into the new 'content zone A' in the new template, without manual intervention from content editors. This significantly reduced the project delivery time, and reduced the risk of errors or lost data.
The benefit of having a reduced number of templates meant a tiered structure of consistent content presentation remained in place, then new widgets would allow administrators to add custom content components to a template as required.
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