Digital Platform and Services

Details

Whangarei District Council (Council) is going to market for the provision of Website Platform and Services.

The process will be a two-staged open market process:
 Registration of Interest (ROI)
 Request for Proposal (RFP)

This ROI is the first formal step in the process and is intended to be of minimal effort for the respondents and allow Council to create a short list of suppliers to invite to enter the RFP process.

The website at www.wdc.govt.nz is Council’s primary online customer service tool to support our residents and ratepayers to complete tasks, source information and engage with council on community and district-wide issues.
The successful platform will be able to respond to the common requirements of a New Zealand local government website without need for bespoke development. The platform will also be configurable to suit the needs of our audience.

Providing an excellent customer experience is central to this project. Our customers need to find information, complete tasks and engage with us in the way that suits them, and using the device that they choose. The design interface will be task driven with a strong search capability.
The CMS solution must support “configuration over customisation”. We seek a cloud-based managed solution that can scale to suit our organisational needs and will deliver our customers an amazing user experience. It will have improved engagement features and make better use of Council’s existing tools/systems than our current websites.

The platform will have the capacity to grow to accommodate our future requirements and will offer the opportunity to align and/or integrate with future online services solutions as well as our existing systems. The content authoring tool will have an intuitive user interface out of the box. Administration of the CMS will not require specialist technical expertise.
SharePoint 2010 is the platform currently supporting the three key Council websites: WDC.govt.nz, the library and Venue & Events. In 2015 Microsoft stopped developing SharePoint as a product for public facing websites.
In addition to the above, content and the management of key content has been sporadically maintained by a small subset of individuals across the organisation, leading to stale and inaccurate information across the different mediums.