About the Shire of Augusta Margaret River
The Shire of Augusta Margaret River is a local government area in the South West region of Western Australia, approximately 270km south of Perth. The shire had an incredibly old website that was difficult to manage and no longer served the community.
The challenge
The Shire of Augusta Margaret River engaged our team to redevelop their existing site, which had become outdated and wasn’t meeting the goals of the business, nor the community's needs. It was difficult for our client to make updates to the website without relying on a web developer, which resulted in the site being an outdated source of information. The shire needed a solution that would allow the team to take control of their website, whilst also making use of integrations to improve business processes.
The solution
To deliver a website that gave the community exactly what they needed, we took a user-experience design approach with the project. The information architecture (IA) and wireframes were co-designed with community members and were then implemented by our in-house team.
Design
The project started with our designers, who gave a modern touch to the outdated brand. The challenge was to maintain the shire’s colours, which proved difficulty in meeting accessibility standards. Our designers worked their creative magic and delivered beyond expectations.
Kentico CMS
We built the website on Kentico’s most recent platform; Kentico 13. Kentico uses the latest .net core for the application interface, which allows the website to run faster, providing a superior user experience. It’s the only CMS using this technology.Using Kentico’s features allowed the site to meet the goals of the project. Some of the features include:
- A user-friendly CMS that allows our clients to make updates themselves
- User roles and permissions to authorise access to certain pages, whilst restricting other pages
- Intelligent integrations with other software to improve business processes.
Harbor Software integration
The Shire of Augusta Margaret River uses Harbor Software to record notes from council meetings. It would save the team a lot of time if these notes, and other documents, could be stored and accessed within the website. Our developers created a custom integration between the two, meaning that the documentation for Minutes and Agendas can be accessed within Kentico, instantly.
Mailchimp integration
The Shire of Augusta Margaret River manually re-purposed content from their website into Mailchimp emails. An integration would eliminate the need to do this manually, since content could be pushed from Kentico to Mailchimp. Due to complex subscriber properties, the standard integration didn’t work.
Instead, our developers created a custom integration. With the integration in place, content is dynamically pushed from Kentico to Mailchimp and the team simply need to review the email. A huge amount of time saved for the team.
The results
