Carterton District Council had a website that had served valiantly for many years but was starting to show its age.
Nectarine was engaged, with support from Wairarapa Web Design, to create a fresh, vibrant look in a streamlined, responsive, SEO-friendly website.
A key element was that key council staff would be confident in being able to update the site themselves, especially with the need to quickly implement alerts about road, emergency, water and fire issues. WordPress’s text-editor-style back-end, together with Divi’s page-builder (and front-end editor) have proved to be a successful combination with staff leaping in and feeling comfortable with very little support needed.
Bek’s redesign uses 2D isometric icons to give a quirky, friendly look that reflects Carterton itself, and a lot of work was done to make sure that the many, many layers of information would be approachable so that users could find the information they needed as easily as possible. Each icon, and the menu levels, were carefully chosen to place the most frequently used in the most visible positions, while still allowing for another 20 services be revealed with a single click.
Another area where this focus on usability shows is the Contact page. Previously, contact details and opening hours were scattered around the website. We brought everything together on a single page and used an accordion interface so that it was incredibly easy to find the particular service you wanted, and then use a click to reveal information about opening hours, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact info.
Bek also added a bit of style refinement to the Carterton DC logo so that it’s cleaner and more modern while still retaining the feel of the classic logo.
Carterton is one of the gems of Aotearoa New Zealand; they’ve now got a website that reflects the artistic, lively and beautiful area, and that serves the local community brilliantly!
You can see the site at cdc.govt.nz
