Byron Shire Council engages community with innovative website restructure

Located on the far north coast of New South Wales, Byron Shire Council is a well-known tourist destination attracting more than 1 million visitors to its rural beauty and beaches annually. Home to more than 30,000 residents, Byron Shire’s website serves as a central information hub for its diverse and engaged community.

Byron Shire launched its website in 2018, but the overall structure of the site had become hard to navigate and residents had trouble finding information. The council heard feedback from the community that the search function wasn’t turning up the results needed. There were also internal challenges with adding new content to the site since the structure was limited and content often didn’t fit within the current site map.

Charlotte Hayes, website and digital content officer for Byron Shire Council, knew the town needed to revamp the website in a strategic way that balanced both the community’s needs and organisational goals.

“We wanted to show the full breadth of what we do at council,” Hayes said, “And get a more user-centric architecture in place that made sense to the community.”

Hayes worked with departments across the organisation to outline the goals for the project and understand the internal needs. Ultimately, Byron Shire focused on three overall goals for the new site: educate the community on council initiatives with streamlined content, engage the community with a more user-centric structure, and improve the site’s accessibility.

For a strategic project of this size, Hayes, with the support of the council, decided to bring on a partner to help strategically recreate the site. In 2022, Hayes began working with Granicus Experience Group (GXG), which helps governments achieve measurable outcomes by designing custom solutions for outreach, enrolment, engagement, and service delivery. Hayes partnered with GXG to rebuild the information architecture to be more user-centric — the first major restructuring Byron Shire had done since 2018 — and to refresh the website’s design.

GXG and Hayes started their work with a content audit of the entire site and conducted surveys to get feedback from internal teams and the community. GXG then reviewed web traffic analysis, search query data, and testing data, and paired those results with the Shire’s organisational goals, website best practices, and internal processes.

GXG focused on three variables when building the information architecture: users, content, and context. The team analysed users’ information seeking behaviour, the current user experience, and feedback from the community on the information and services they needed to access on the website.

GXG also outlined Byron Shire’s content objectives and then analysed the council’s current content formats, publishing volume, content governance, and existing CMS structure.

Lastly, GXG worked with Hayes to understand the context in which the information architecture is being built, making sure the new structure would meet council goals and would seamlessly operate with Byron Shire’s current resources, capabilities, and technology.

“We were so lucky because we got to tailor what we needed,” Hayes said.

As part of the restructuring, GXG also worked with the council to refresh the design of the website, implementing their brand style guide consistently and creatively throughout the site.

Since the launch of the new information architecture and the design refresh this past year, the shire has seen a 37% increase in organic search traffic, a 28% increase in user engagement, and a more than 12% increase in page views.

“Even though the restructure had more impact on usability, the refresh got more attention because people liked how things looked and it kept them on the website longer,” Hayes said.

Soon after the relaunch, Hayes noted that residents screenshotted and shared information online about various programmes like pet education — something the council had always offered but wasn’t easy to find on the old website.

Hayes also said the new structure helped her establish clear governance around content production. As GXG built the sitemap, Hayes worked with departments across the organisation to explain the goals of the new information architecture and used the data Granicus had analysed to show where content wasn’t performing or was outdated. She also brought teams on the design journey — updating them on the progress of the sitemap and giving them an opportunity to review the pages.

Taking a data-driven approach to the information architecture allowed Hayes to build content practices that govern when content is updated or archived with support from teams across the organisation — keeping the site clean, streamlined, and user friendly.

Since the relaunch, Hayes has heard positive feedback from internal departments on the intuitive nature of the new structure, website themes, and content processes.