City West Water Website

City West Water is responsible for the supply of drinking water, sewerage, recycyled water and trade waste management for some 305,000+ residents of the local government areas of Melbourne CBD, inner and west.This includes councils such as Brimbank, Hobsons Bay, Maribyrnong, Melbourne (north of the Yarra River), Moonee Valley, Wyndham, Yarra and parts of Melton and Hume.

With such a large and diverse audience to service, the pre-existing website had over time grown to be complex and unwieldy in both its layout and information architecture. Information was scattered across different areas of the site and updating had become a time consuming and at times error prone process. Additionally, the website having been developed back in the days of Internet Explorer 4 & 5, was not meeting usability and accessibility requirements for the new web browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Safari, Firefox etc - it was identified that W3C Accessibility Standards were needing to be enforced.

City West Water went to public tender and Areeba were awarded the project to rebuild the online infrastructure to include:

• RedDot CMS Implementation
• Information Architecture
• Priority One (A) W3C Accessibility Standards for HTML implementation
• Simplified Workflow to optimise authoring, permissions by content areas, approvals and publishing
• Site Search

In addition to the website rebuild, Areeba's expertise was called upon to work with the Online Services component of the website. This included:

• Optimisation of Online Services to increase traffic
• A focus on Usability and an intuitive user interface
• Simplification of Process Flows
• Conversion of the existing Java environment to ASP.NET
• Integration with City West Water's internal legacy systems via Web Services
• Design and development of the User Authentication model, including Database Design, Web Service specifications and interfacing requirements

Working with City West Water's IT Infrastructure partner, Logica CMG, the Areeba team were able to gather the business requirements with the end result of a more efficient and structured website the primary goal. As with any complex project, Areeba elected to place 2 staff full time onsite with the client to ensure the best opportunity for understanding the business practices were available. This proved invaluable during User Acceptance testing as well as enabling efficient communications as the project approached launch date.