The City of Parramatta Council (CoP) were looking for a web design and development agency with strong Drupal expertise, who could also appreciate commercial and reputational risk, user-centred design, and could deliver industry best practices. In 2020, CoP contracted Bliss Digital on two major website development projects using Drupal 8 and Acquia Cloud.

The project involved significant enhancements to the council’s main website along with their flagship tourism site, Discover Parramatta.

Bliss Digital specialises in helping local councils improve services to their citizens through digital transformation and user-centred design. Through our human-centred design approach, we helped the City of Parramatta bring to life their strategic vision (Community Strategic Plan 2018-2038), through design, testing, refinement and validation. Design deliverables for the project included new information architecture, user journey mapping, wireframes and mobile-first user-interface designs.

We focused on simplifying the navigation to make information as easy to find as possible. Improving the search function was also important. The end-result was a best-in-class council website that is user-centred, modern and accessible.

All of CoP’s websites are hosted on Acquia Cloud’s multisite environment. Acquia Cloud provides continuous delivery best practices by seamlessly embedding clear stages for testing into the workflow. Automated tests flag issues as content is migrated between environments, and the activity log ensures that issues can quickly be isolated by identifying recent changes. The workflow also offers live development, making it possible to implement changes to code on development and staging environments directly, without needing to work locally first. Additionally, Acquia Cloud CD powers developers and DevOps teams with the fastest way to deliver high-quality digital experiences.

In addition, Drupal on Acquia’s Cloud has powerful personalisation capabilities for targeting and retargeting content. This includes the ability to use Drupal to draw from geolocation, browser history, device type and behaviour taxonomies—which builds a unique, personalised profile of each visitor. We were able to use these data points to build a comprehensive vision of each user and tailor the website experience to their profile.

Today we continue to support the City of Parramatta with website support and maintenance under a SLA.

Launch website: cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au