Project Overview
The City of Ballarat has an award winning tourism website, as well as several other websites that promote the region in various ways. However it lacked a cohesive website solution that promoted the liveability of the region; hence the need to create a website purely focused on communicating the value and benefits of living, working and studying in Ballarat.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Flavio Argemi - Creative Director & UX+UI Designer
Jon Low - Technical Director
Jordan Binskin - Web Developer
Justin Low - Web Developer
Tiago Brito - Web Developer
Brenton Cannizzaro - Content + Project Manager
Project Brief
The brief was clear; create a high-performing website enabling the strong promotion of the liveability of Ballarat. The website needed to provide an outstanding user and information experience that expertly communicates the value and benefits of living, working and studying in the Ballarat region.
Accordingly, the key components of the project aims and brief were as follows:
Act as a concierge site, provide a landing page for search marketing
- The current websites promoting living in the region were not connecting with target audiences through keyword Internet searches, causing confusion and a lack of opportunity. Accordingly, the new website needed to act as a concierge site for people looking for information about living in Ballarat.
Build interest and Ballarat’s brand as a place to live, work and invest
- A new, consolidated website solution was required to powerfully sell the liveability of Ballarat, and provide key information for stakeholders and act as a destination for SEO and SEM initiatives. The new Ballarat brand identity, plus the fact Ballarat was titled the most liveable regional city in Australia in 2020, were key facets of this to motivate people to learn more about the liveability of Ballarat.
Replace the existing Ballarat Capital website
- The new ‘Ballarat.com.au’ website solution will enable the decommissioning of the ‘ballaratcapital.com.au’ website.
Strong technology platform
- The new website must provide a leading-edge technology platform that acts as a platform for future growth and provides improved administrative ease of use.
Project Innovation/Need
To be achieve the project goals, we created a leading-edge web platform that was a custom Headless website development, utilising WordPress as the CMS. The term “headless” comes from the concept of removing the “head” (front-end) of the website from the “body” (the back-end CMS and the content repository).
The front-end development was created in the Next.js React framework, and is hosted on next-generation web hosting with multiple servers via global CDN (Content Delivery Network). The website back-end is housed on dedicated Cloud based Hosting with Amazon AWS. The web-servers dynamically connected via Git to deploy content updates from the back-end to the front-end.
The headless approach delivers enormous benefits, specifically with page load speed and website security. This approach was imperative to deliver on one of the main website goals, which was to improve website page load speed.
Design Challenge
From our strategy process, we knew that the website needed to communicate the new Ballarat branding to be front and centre, whilst at the same time being suitable to powerfully communicate a range of different content focus areas.
The City of Ballarat staff also require the ability to powerfully structure and present content easily and with flexibility within the CMS. To meet this requirement, dedicated website templates were created for the different content sections, all consisting of structured layout components combined with flexible modules that can be utilised in different ways, yet in a consistent information delivery and brand approach.
User Experience
The design and technology approach implemented for the project has delivered substantial user experience benefits.
Most significantly is with web page load speed, was ranks in excess of 90 out of 100 on Google Lighthouse speed ranking.
Digital - Corporate
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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