City of Greater Bendigo

We have a new understanding of the role of local government, having spent a lot of 2016 working on content for the new City of Greater Bendigo website. This project was a comprehensive update of their website, and included new design, technology, IA and content.

Happy Content signed up as content partner and embarked on updating current content and rewriting new pages, working out menu labels, and the content IA below the primary nav. To help keep the content in good shape and meeting accessibility goals, we wrote a comprehensive content and language style guide for their content authors.

A few thousand pages of content later and a lot of liaising with the city’ online comms officer and we had a site that was in pretty good shape, agreeable to the various content owners and edging its way towards Level AA compliance. Nice work, team!

The City had settled on a devolved model of content management, which means that the person steering each business function (registering dogs, parking, parks and gardens etc.) is responsible for keeping any relevant content up-to-date. To warm content managers up to the job (new CMS, new style guide and new ideas about audiences and accessibility) we ran a series of training sessions – online content 101 for the less experienced, and achieving accessible content for our content evangelists.