City of Newcastle

The Newcastle City Council website with an average of nearly 80,000 visitors a month had grown to become a key information delivery and marketing tool. An increase in user confidence and familiarity with Internet usage had raised community expectations to the functions, interactive facilities and currency of the information visitors expected to find on the website. Council’s Communications unit and IT department co-ordinated a website review and feedback process which identified a new Content Management System (CMS) would be required to manage content and provide enhanced functionality. Squiz was successful in winning the new website tender due to the user friendly MySource Matrix interface, holistic range of Squiz professional services (implementation, training and help desk support etc.) offered and a competitive price. The citizens of Newcastle now have a fantastic modern information portal that enables them to connect with the city and instantly receive help and assistance on a range of Council and Community topics. Users can also contribute to events online, lodge issues or concerns via an online form and pay their rates. Over time the site will become increasingly interactive, with the introduction of more online forms and Web 2.0 functionality such as public forums, membership areas and RSS feeds.

The creative and friendly team at Squiz are great to work with. The MySource Matrix International User Conferences have further enhanced our relationship and have been an excellent way to meet other MySource Matrix users while learning practical tips from the experts.

About Newcastle

Less than two hours drive north of Sydney is the City of Newcastle. Newcastle reaches out to the sea, creating Australia’s only city centre bounded by pristine beaches and an active working harbour. Serving the 140,000 residents of the Local Government Area (LGA) of Newcastle is the responsibility of Newcastle City Council.

http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au

Newcastle City Council’s website is the leading source of information for those living and doing business in the Newcastle LGA. The site offers helpful details on Council services & facilities, community news & events, the environment, building and development issues and the latest Council news. It provides facilities for ratepayers to pay their rates and lodge complaints online.

Challenge 

With an average of nearly 80,000 visitors a month, Newcastle City Council's website had grown to become a key information delivery and marketing tool for Council. An increase in user confidence and familiarity with Internet usage had aised community expectations with regard to the functions, interactive facilities and currency of the information they expect to find on the website.

In 2005 Council’s Communications Unit and IT department co-ordinated a website review and feedback process which led to a comprehensive redesign and restructure the website. In order to go live with this new look and structure, Council identified a new Content Management System (CMS) would be required to manage content and provide enhanced functionality.

Solution

Squiz were successful in winning the new website tender due to the user friendly MySource Matrix interface, holistic range of Squiz professional services (implementation, training and help desk support etc.) offered and the competitive price. Squiz delivered a number of services to Council including:.

• Implementation of the Squiz ‘Supported Open Source’ CMS, MySource Matrix including server setup,graphic design, application of design, project management, implementation specialist services (for thecustomisation and configuration of templates), system testing, go-live, reporting and training.
• A project manager who co-ordinated deliverables from each of Squiz’s business units and followed theproject through to completion of the implementation process.
• MySource Matrix structured training which showed Council staff how to efficiently publish intranet andcorporate website content (no HTML required) while system administrators learnt how to effectively structurecontent, create publishing workflows and manage users.
• The services of the Squiz Content Migration team to assist with the bulk upload of images and PDFs.
• Development of pages with unique functionality (events calendar, ClimateCam graphs etc.).
• Creation of a MySource Matrix bulk mail e-newsletter.

Result 

The citizens of Newcastle have a fantastic modern information portal that enables them to connect with the city and instantly provide help and assistance on a range of Council and Community topics. Users can currently contribute to events online, lodge issues or concerns via an online form and pay their rates. They can browse through a range of photo galleries and explore a comprehensive list of policies and plans. Because the enterprise class MySource Matrix does not have “per site’ or ‘per user’ licence fees, one instance provides a platform for a mirrored Councillor Intranet and for the future development of a Staff Intranet, and any micro sites that Council may wish to develop.

Over time the site will become increasingly interactive, with the introduction of more online forms and Web 2.0 functionality such as public forums, membership areas and RSS feeds. The website is hosted by Council onsite and runs on 1 MySource Matrix server and 1 database server, a configuration that can easily be scaled to meet future demand. Council has a Service Level Agreement with Squiz to provide ongoing maintenance services.

Climate Cam

Squiz were also instrumental in upgrading the existing ClimateCam website to report the resources consumed and greenhouse gas emissions produced by the City of Newcastle. ClimateCam was created in response to the Newcastle community’s request to track the greenhouse gas emissions of the City. It is the first measuring tool of its kind in Australia.

http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/environment/climate_cam

This image below shows how members of the community can easily create an event using out-of-the box MySource Matrix functionality.