Empowering Benalla Rural City Council with a modern, accessible, and user-friendly website. We designed and developed a streamlined digital platform that enhances community engagement, simplifies content management, and integrates seamlessly with Council services.
Benalla Rural City Council required a complete redevelopment of their corporate website to enhance user experience, accessibility, and content management.
The new platform needed to integrate with the Council’s core business applications, ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, and provide an intuitive content management system (CMS) for Council staff.
The website had to be modern, mobile-responsive, and capable of handling high-traffic public services efficiently.
Decode successfully delivered a robust, scalable, and user-friendly website using WordPress as the CMS, ensuring seamless navigation and accessibility.
The new site features a refreshed design aligned with Council branding, streamlined content management capabilities, and integrations with essential third-party systems.
A comprehensive training program enabled Council staff to independently manage content updates, while ongoing support and hosting solutions ensured the site's security, performance, and compliance with government standards.
We engaged key Council stakeholders through workshops and interviews to define project goals, user needs, and technical requirements. A gap analysis identified opportunities for improvement, leading to a clear roadmap for development.
To deliver an optimal user experience, we took a human-centred design approach, ensuring accessibility and ease of use across all devices. Our design team created high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes, refining them through multiple stakeholder feedback rounds.
The site was built using WordPress, with a custom theme leveraging the Gutenberg block editor and Carbon Fields for flexible content management. We implemented a structured sitemap and dynamic content modules for enhanced usability.
We integrated the website with key Council systems, including agenda and minutes search, document management, a careers portal, and interactive maps. These integrations ensured streamlined public access to essential information.
Decode provided a secure and high-performance cloud hosting solution with 99.9% uptime, automatic backups, and a scalable architecture to accommodate future growth.
Post-launch, we established a managed support agreement, including 24/7 incident response, security patching, performance monitoring, and routine updates to keep the site secure and optimised.
