Designed for How People Live, Search, and Engage: City of Parramatta’s Award-Winning Digital Transformation

One of Australia’s fastest growing and most diverse cities, Parramatta serves more than 260,000 residents, workers, students, and visitors, each with rising expectations for digital services that are intuitive, accessible, and mobile-friendly. But as customer behaviours evolved, the city’s legacy website struggled to keep pace.

Research revealed a fundamental disconnect between how the site was structured and how residents searched for information. Navigation reflected internal Council structures rather than customer needs, search satisfaction lagged, and mobile and accessibility experiences required significant improvement.

“As expectations around digital services shifted, our research showed the website was driving contact centre enquiries instead of reducing them,” explained Anna Pijaca, group manager of marketing, brand, and creative services for City of Parramatta. “It wasn’t designed around how customers search for information.”

As part of a broader Customer Experience Transformation Plan, Parramatta identified its website as the critical starting point — the digital front door through which nearly every service interaction flowed.

Rather than simply replatforming, Parramatta took a fundamentally different approach: redesigning the website around customer journeys, data insights, and community feedback to remove friction at every step.

The team began with an extensive website audit, analytics review, and user testing to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and where residents were getting stuck. Content and navigation were rebuilt to mirror how people naturally search for services and local information, not how Council is organised internally. High-traffic pages were rewritten in plain language, accessibility was prioritised from the ground up, and the experience was designed mobile-first.

With Granicus, Parramatta gained the flexibility, scalability, and governance needed to execute this vision, while integrating key digital services to enable self-service and reduce manual processing behind the scenes.

“The website migration was a core initiative in our customer experience transformation plan,” said Isobel Spurr, digital and creative manager. “Using the Granicus platform, we redesigned the experience around customer journeys, simplified navigation, rewrote high-traffic content in plain language, and ensured the site was mobile-first and accessible.”

Search was made more prominent and optimised with predictive results. Events, programs, and classes were centralised into a single Upcoming Events experience. New features like Sportsground Status alerts allowed residents to subscribe for real-time updates, reducing uncertainty and inbound calls during wet weather.

Crucially, the platform was built not just for launch, but for continuous improvement, enabling ongoing optimisation, accessibility enhancements, and future microsite migrations.

The launch of the new City of Parramatta website delivered immediate, measurable gains across engagement, discoverability, and self-service.

Total website visits increased 79% year over year. Search usage nearly tripled, with search results page visits increasing 188% and time on page more than doubling, a clear signal that residents were finding what they needed faster and with greater confidence. High-demand services saw dramatic growth, including a 403% increase in visits to Sportsground Status pages and a 1,433% increase in Upcoming Events traffic.

Engagement quality improved as well. Residents spent more time on key pages and increasingly relied on mobile devices, with 55% of users now accessing the site on mobile.

“The website now plays a central role in our broader customer experience transformation,” said Rachelle Delgado Tang, digital marketing team leader. “Customers are finding information faster and engaging more with council services.”

Accessibility improvements, plain-language content, and consistent design created a more inclusive experience for Parramatta’s diverse community. Feedback from residents highlighted ease of use, clarity, and reduced effort, while staff reported significant improvements in search usability and content management workflows.

“We’ve improved accessibility, enabled more customers to self-serve online, and created a scalable platform that supports ongoing transformation,” said Carol Mikaelian, website solutions lead. “Most importantly, it’s helping us move closer to a truly customer-centred model where services are easier to access, more consistent, and designed around our community’s needs.”

This story highlights the hard work and innovation that earned City of Parramatta recognition as a winner in the 15th Annual Granicus Digital Government Awards, honouring exceptional achievements in digital government.