City West Water Website

November 2005 - June 2006. Currently active

http://www.citywestwater.com.au

Solutions involved

• Accessibility & Standards Compliance
• Information Architecture
• UI Design

City West Water provides over 305,000 residential and business customers with drinking water, sewerage, trade waste and recycled water services in the Melbourne CBD, inner and western suburban regions.

History

City West Water is responsible for the supply of drinking water, sewerage, recycled water and trade waste management for over 305,000 residents of the local government areas of Melbourne CBD, inner and west.
City West Water went to public tender and Areeba were awarded the project to rebuild the online infrastructure.

Challenge

With such a large and diverse audience to service, the pre-existing website had 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 time consuming and at times, error prone. 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. W3C Accessibility Standards were also required to be enforced across the site.

Solution

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 being the primary goal. Being a complex project, Areeba placed 2 staff onsite with the client to ensure the best opportunity for understanding the business practices. This proved invaluable during User Acceptance testing and enabled efficient communications as the project approached launch date.

In addition to the website rebuild, Areeba were also called upon to work with the Online Services component of the website which 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