Background
The motto of the Westland District Council is ‘Westland for the Wild at Heart’. This is epitomised by the annual Hokitika Wildfoods Festival which has grown in attendance from 1,800 to 13,500, and is reflected in the design of the Wildfoods site by HairyLemon. The council has been a HairyLemon web client since 2001, with HairyLemon designing both the council site and the Wild Foods website.

The Challenge
The council were looking to refresh the design, and to have a single administrative solution to maintain both websites. As the main council site consisted of over 300 pages, it was also vital that updates could all be made in-house with workflow management.

The Solution
HairyLemon played on the uniqueness of the region and the stunning photography that was available through the District Council’s library. The council site was revamped with personalisation added to the design so that visitors are greeted with a “good morning” or a “good afternoon” which runs off the local server time (based in Christchurch). The Wild Foods site was given a quirky design utilising the ‘Purple Pig’ icon, and the people element of the event was emphasised with plenty of snapshots of people enjoying themselves placed throughout the website.

Both websites were migrated to the AssetNow content management system, and the HTML coding was re-written to comply with strict web and usability standards and New Zealand e-government guidelines.

Different administrators can now update different sections of the sites, with a workflow component added to the content management system to keep track of changes.