Darwin City Council website
Captovate designed and developed Darwin City Council's website after previously defining strategic directions for the project in a separate, comprehensive website analysis.
Purpose
Our mission was to develop a website for Darwin City Council that is more engaging, informative and user-friendly than the previous site.
Darwin City Council is responsible for an extremely broad range of services and facilities in a municipality of over 80,000 people. The website should be first port of call for basic information on everything Council does, and where appropriate, provide an alternative to phone or in-person enquiries.
The new website should also enable greater engagement between Council and the community, through more contact avenues and regular content updates.
Objectives
The brief for the job was to design and develop a site that addresses the many needs, wants and recommendations set out in the Darwin City Council website scoping report. These included:
- To become Australia’s best Council site, based on benchmarking around the country. (A recent usability study of all of Australia's Capital City Council websites has confirmed that DCC's new site is indeed number one!).
- To organise the large amount of content into a logical and intuitive architecture
- To be easily updated and edited by many different internal staff at Council under the co-ordination of an internal web manager.
- To provide functionality which reduces the need for people to phone or visit Council where possible
- To inform and engage the community through design and functionality
Special Features
Behind the scenes, the major special feature of the site is the complex hierarchy of editing and approving permissions given to various internal staff within Council for different specific sections. For example, staff within the libraries have access to edit the library section of the site only, and the Climate Change and Environment Team can only edit pages in their section. All content must be checked by a senior approver within each section before it is published.
Another feature to improve the content editing experience, as well as to ensure that content remains consistent, is the customisation of many content types such as lost dog listings, job vacancies and requests for tender. With many people accessing and editing these sections, it was important that they were each set up as individual content fields so that listings are consistent each time.
On the ‘Front of House’ side, many special features were incorporated into the Darwin City Council website to make it more engaging and interactive. These include:
- Editable dynamic home page slider
- Customised Google maps
- Customised Google search
- ‘Ask Us About…’ mini web contact form on each content page, dynamically loaded with the page title as subject
- Editable events calendar with multiple categories
- Latest News feed
- Multi category image gallery
- ‘Lord Mayor’s Blog’
- Web forms and downloadable forms where applicable
Technical Features
Captovate developed the Darwin City Council website using a fully customised implementation of the Drupal Content Management System. This included configuration and customisation of over 50 modules and integrated APIs for customised Google mapping and Google search within the site.
The site is hosted on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for improved bandwidth, space and security.