New visual design and site for Stay Smart Online

The players

Stay Smart Online provides information and advice to help consumers and businesses protect themselves online. This includes up-to-date information on the latest online threats and how to respond.

The problem

The Stay Smart Online website was originally part of the Department of Communications and the Arts website, but was then reassigned to the Attorney-General’s Department. The site needed to be moved and the Attorney-General’s Department wanted to create a new, independent website.

Stay Smart Online needed a new visual design and the information architecture (IA) also needed significant work to improve the site’s usability and ensure users could find the information they needed. While the existing content was already in govCMS, the govCMS database needed cleaning up and had to be brought across to a new govCMS site with additional functionality.

The solution

The Attorney-General’s Department engaged Acquia to build the new site, and Acquia contracted the job to Salsa Digital. As part of our initial discovery phase, we started the project with a two-day workshop focusing on the visual design requirements, user experience, IA, content management system design, content types, mapping content to the govCMS template and mapping the IA to the page types.

Next, we focused on finalising the new look and feel for Stay Smart Online and delivering several visual design options for the Attorney-General’s Department. We then adapted the govCMS template to the new branding. Minor adaptations were made to the govCMS template including additional colours and fonts and some small design changes.

Other enhancements to the site included:

• A slider on the govCMS template
• Some new content types (including landing page and partner logos)
• Featured news listing on homepage and landing page
• Improved alerts listing
• Sidebar widgets/navigation
• Improved visual display for all partner logos
• ‘Was this page useful?’ feedback component
• Social media connections, including page sharing

In terms of the website development, Salsa Digital completed the backend configuration for the new requirements and cleaned up the existing database before integrating it into the new backend and theming the site.

The project was completed under fairly tight deadlines, with an eight-week build phase (including user acceptance testing).

Desktop

Tablet	Mobile

The benefits

The Stay Smart Online website project delivered the following benefits to the Attorney-General’s Department:

• A new, contemporary look and feel

• The standard govCMS advantages:

• a stable and reliable CMS

• 24x7 enterprise support and proactive monitoring

• security compliance at the highest level

• an easy-to-use CMS

• The ability to promote alerts and news on the homepage

• A better structured partner directory

• Improved IA

• Added functionality — e.g. a better navigation setup and the ability to have content ratings and track people's feedback on a per page basis

• New, updated content (the new site provided an opportunity to rewrite the content)

• Pages that promote alerts (e.g. latest news, alert service with most current alerts first)

• Design cost savings from adapting the govCMS theme

Why Salsa Digital?

Salsa Digital is an Acquia partner with a proven track record working with both Acquia and govCMS. Our developers have experience and accreditation in Drupal/govCMS and we were named Acquia’s Partner of the Year Asia Pacific and Japan (2016). We’re trusted in the marketplace and we know the product extremely well.

In addition, we have a strong creative team that designs visually appealing, AA-compliant and responsive visual implementations. The combination of our creative team and govCMS expertise made us an ideal choice for this project, backed by our strong working relationship with Acquia.