City of Boroondara New Website Launched

After several months in development, the City of Boroondara has a fresh new website, designed and built by Datalink.

The City of Boroondara is a metropolitan council, representing more than 165,000 people in the inner-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

The City of Boroondara website was in need of a refresh to keep up with the times, Datalink's previous website for the council had lasted many years and even with a robust content management platform in place, age had caught up with it and it was beginning to get quite large in terms of the amount of content.

So Datalink conducted a review with the City of Boroondara and set out to redesign the site with the primary aim being to make it one of the first Web2.0 friendly council websites in Victoria.   This was facilitated by use of the latest Web2.0 friendly features of Freestyler CMS.



The result has been largely successful.  The new site is crisp, clean, simple and inkeeping with the council's corporate identity.  It features user-centred navigation, including an "I want" list, as well as several accessibility features. 

A large news slider provides a bold hero image for the website.  Each section is complemented by large attractive images and lists of popular pages.

The website embraces Web2.0, with a social media type content feed integrating with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and RSS feeds as well as integrated Google maps.

There are more subtle user-centred features too.  For instance when youvisit the library pages, the website automatically knows which day itis and what the opening times are for each branch.  This sort ofattention to detail is a credit to the project management team andBoroondara and the website is littered with great examples of finetuned templates.



In addition, the site has a large number of e-business and e-government features including online forms and surveys and library catalogue integration.

Navigation is kept clean with heirarchical menus and the use of a superfooter.

Ray Stone worked with City of Boroondara on the graphical design, while Datalink's Jenny Joseph performed the majority of the programming work with additional project management from Sean Fishlock.

The new site can be viewed at www.boroondara.vic.gov.au