Description
With a population of 18,250, White Rock is a breathtaking city located in the southwest corner of the Lower Mainland, forty-five kilometres from Vancouver and only five minutes to the Canada/US border. It is an exciting seaside community clustered around an eight kilometre sandy beach and the warm shallow waters of Semiahmoo Bay.
White Rock has a wealth of natural beauty and the City wanted to promote this more with their new website than they had done in the site's previous iterations. What this required from our end was a method of display lush, colourful visuals without sacrificing content readability.
Our primary focus was on user experience, which would pinpoint that combination: strong use of photography as a marketing tool in unity with an improved site architecture and content display. This medley would ensure that constituents, visitors and businesses all found information as easily as possible.
We began the process with simultaneous work on design and site architecture, which helped us reach these twin goals. With a collaborative focus on visuals and structure, we came up with a design that was easy to navigate, bright and colourful, while content became easy to find and even easier to read off the screen.
Having had a site that was heavily out of date, the City requested and required a large of amount of new functionality. White Rock knew their site was behind the times and they wanted to push it to be on the cutting edge of municipal sites.
We next began coding and templating the website, as we moved it into our content management system, ElementCMS. Our CMS system was chosen to implement the new website due its robust feature set and numerous customized modules that we could tailor and integrate. With the combination of our abundant standard features, merged with the modules we created specifically for White Rock, they received a powerful system that allows City staff to update all aspects of the website themselves.
After completing the design, navigation and CMS integration, we got down to work on making the site even more powerful and interactive. Functionality that we created and added featured: a custom bylaws module; an integrated garbage calendar; Google translation; RSS feeds; a bespoke City Spotlight application; user poll functionality; and social media integration.
Next, we tackled accessibility. Much as municipal government should be for all constituents, so, too, should their website. With that in mind, we place a very strong focus on accessibility. This includes a text-resizer, a high-contrast stylesheet and coding standards created for screen readers, all to benefit the visually impaired. A mobile stylesheet was also added so that people using any kind of device will be able to get the most out of the website.
By synthesizing aesthetics with functionality - and doing so in a comprehensive, structured approach - we were able to create a website for White Rock that reached all their goals, while doing so in a quick, efficient manner.
