Our partnership with WALGA started back in 2015 to execute our digital strategy amalgamating 6 websites into 1 single site. 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.
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.
A key aspect of looking after WALGA’s development was to ensure that all the data, code and information remained local. As standard practice, Dapth only use their 100% local in-house development team. This helped to ensure that at any time WALGA had access to the very team doing the work. Even if project champions within WALGA change, Dapth were able to provide consistent access to the resources required to educate and train them in a reliable manner.
Our website solution for WALGA includes a robust user management system that allowed a tiered admin management structure for data across 3 online applications. This included key integrations into Landgate and MS Dynamics for displaying preferred supplier information and a dynamics directory for people to easily use.
The website was built initially on Kentico version 9 at the time of the latest redesign project they were on Kentico Version 11, as such the facelift gave opportunity for WALGA to upgrade to Version 12. Once delivered, the WALGA team continued to provide online services to their members, with users able to register for access, and once approved, the ability to delegate access to other staff within their council. Additionally, content administrators from WALGA also have a simple dashboard that enables easy management of all the councils they are in charge of, and a complex notification system is in place to ensure that any requests for access to services or systems is received by the applicable administrator.
Join the list of many other local councils in leveraging the power of Kentico for their website.
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