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Shire of Peppermint Grove website

The Challenge

The Shire of Peppermint Grove’s previous website was a static HTML site which was difficult to update internally. They were looking for a Content Management Solution (CMS) that would allow internal stuff who are not very familiar with web publishing to post and manage content on their website. The new website needed to be user friendly to cater to all in the community, especially the ageing population.

When revamping an existing website, there is usually some downtime. The Shire wanted to avoid this downtime all together as it provided a large body of important information to rate payers. This provided a further challenge.

Our Solution

The existing shire logo was starting to look dated so we started with giving the logo a refresh whilst still keeping the crest to give it a modern twist.

The next stage was the site design. We sent the shire several options to consider which included visually appealing design, user friendly navigation and clean lines. With a few minor tweaks to the conceptual design, a winner was chosen and we started building the website. One of the main criteria of the project was that the CMS was easy to use – with this in mind we choose a WordPress CMS as it’s proven to be one of the easiest CMS’s to use in its field.

Due to the ‘no downtime’ request we had to think of a clever work around. We developed the new website on a separate server and worked with a temporary domain. This also allowed us to show the Shire a work in progress and once everyone was happy we switched the domain and the new site was live – achieving the task of zero downtime.

Finally we provided training on using the WordPress CMS to a dozen of the Shire staff who would be responsible for the maintenance of their allocated sections. Since going live, the shire has easily managed Shire announcements and updates.

 

Website:
peppermintgrove.wa.gov.au
Launched:
June 2012

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