Enhancing user experience for New Zealand’s environmental authority

EPA’s legacy site was cluttered and hard to navigate with some of its key information nested deep in the architecture, making it difficult to find for visitors. Silverstripe worked with EPA to create an easier to navigate site, with a modern appearance, on site search, richer content sources and most importantly, simple for EPA to maintain.

EPA’s website acts as the public facing source of truth for the agency, housing all of the data the agency collects and publishes. This includes public consultations, applications and permits, everyday environmental hazards and a large database for various substances and their potential impact on the environment. The EPA website hosts tens of thousands of documents, many of which are legally required public records.

During the project there were both minor and major changes to the scope of the project. An agile approach allowed Silverstripe to remain understanding and accommodating and use the situation to build a foundation of trust with EPA. Both parties were honest when things got difficult, encouraging collaboration over control.

Silverstripe delivered a beautiful new brochure site as well as custom built APIs to pull and display extensive database information. A custom sidebar navigation with themes for each section of the EPA business helped to solidify the work EPA had done around identity and brand. Other key outcomes included powerful search within document searching and logical presentation of the sites information architecture.