Blue Mountains City Council

Website design and development

“New website is cool & beautiful … the new website is awesome. Looks really great and so clean. Great job everyone.”

– PAUL HAMILTON, Manager of Information Systems

Reviving the Blue Mountains City Council

BMCC (Blue Mountains City Council) approached FIRST to redevelop its website to be more visually appealing, modern and succinct. The new site also needed to be mobile friendly and better able to engage with customers and promote its council-provided services.

Some of the challenges included:

• Migrate the old site’s content to a new whole of government CMS
• WCAG 2.0 compliant
• The site needed to give staff the ability to edit all content across the site
• The redesign had to be an engaging and informative platform about the services offered by the council
• Quick and easy access to the most visited pages of the site

Strategy & Planning

UXD

Interface Design

Development

Why First?

BMCC was looking for a digital marketing agency that could provide end-to-end design and development capabilities with search engine-optimised knowledge. On top of that, the Council was also looking for an agency that would continue to provide support after the new website was built.

New look and feel

The site was built using Drupal with a new structure and fresh content to showcase the whole of the Blue Mountains.

The new responsive website for BMCC is more visually appealing with larger imagery to show off the beauty of the mountain region and visual graphics to display key information. Google Maps was also integrated into the website to provide a more interactive experience for users when looking up recreational and community information in the area.

Content is made accessible via a megamenu based on user type, while the most visited pages are listed as quicklinks on the home page’s carousel removing the need for users to navigate through the menu or website to find the relevant page.

The site now has an alert popup that makes it easier to inform users of any natural disasters, such as bushfires and snowfall in the area, or imminent information.

Being a government body, the site is WCAG 2.0 compliant and accessible to users across all devices. The CMS is also streamlined to allow for content management collaboration.