Local Council Website Redesign, CMS Migration and Ongoing Support in Australia
A council website carries an unusual load. It is a service counter, a compliance obligation and a public record, and it has to work for every resident in the area.
That last part is the difficult one. A commercial site can profile its audience. A council serves everyone in the local government area, including people on old devices, people with limited English and people with disability, all of whom are entitled to the same service.
This piece covers what to plan for in a council redesign or CMS migration, and what to hold a delivery partner to.
Key Takeaways
- Accessibility is a statutory obligation for councils, not a quality target, and the duty stays with the council.
- Most council traffic is transactional, so measure success on task completion rather than time on site.
- Migration effort is driven by the size and state of the content estate, which is usually larger than anyone estimates.
- Integration with existing systems determines whether residents can self-serve or end up phoning anyway.
- Plan the operating model for year two, because council teams are small and turnover is real.
Accessibility Is the Baseline, Not the Goal
The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies, and WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the current reference point for Australian government digital services and for Digital NSW. Older policy documents and existing contracts still cite WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so establish in writing which version any quote is built against.
The obligation binds the council providing the service. It is not transferred by a supplier contract, which is why accessibility belongs in the build rather than in a post-launch audit that arrives after the budget has gone.
Webcoda builds to the WCAG guidelines during design and development. On a council project, ask specifically when accessibility is tested, who tests it, and what happens to defects found late.
Residents Come to Do Something
Very few people visit a council website to browse. They want to pay a rates notice, book a facility, report a problem, check a bin day, find out whether a development application affects them.
That makes navigation and findability the centre of the project. Webcoda designed navigation for Metropolitan Memorial Parks on cognitive-psychology principles, and that work produced a 45% reduction in time-to-content and a 30% decrease in administrative tasks. The second number is the one council executives tend to notice, because reduced administrative load is reduced cost.
Measure the Right Thing
Task completion, search success and call deflection tell you whether the site works. Time on page tells you very little when the aim is to get someone answered and away.
Be Honest About the Content Estate
Council sites accumulate. Minutes, policies, development applications, historical notices, forms in several formats, pages nobody has owned for years.
The migration question is not just how many pages, it is how many are still accurate, who owns them, and what can be retired. Content audit and rationalisation is where a redesign either creates a maintainable site or copies the existing mess into a nicer template.
Webcoda has migrated at scale, including UTS College's 1,400-page site, and moved Sydney Zoo off WordPress in phases, integration first and CMS second, so the riskiest dependency was resolved before content work began. Phasing suits councils well, because it lets a difficult integration be proven while the existing site keeps running.
Integration Decides Whether Self-Service Works
Residents can only self-serve if the website can talk to the systems holding the answers. Payments, bookings, request tracking and mapping all sit in other software.
Webcoda's systems integration work covers payment gateways including eWAY, WorldPay, SecurePay and PayPal, CRM connections including Microsoft Dynamics and custom CRMs, and platform-to-platform work such as Kentico to SharePoint and Kentico to mobile apps. For Tresillian, a Google Maps integration lets people find their nearest centre, which is the same shape of problem as a resident finding their nearest library or waste facility.
Ask a prospective partner to describe an integration that went wrong and what they did about it. The answer is more informative than a list of logos.
Once those systems are connected, an assistant answering common resident questions can take further pressure off the call centre. Treat it as a later phase rather than part of the redesign, because it only works when the information behind it is already accurate and findable.
Plan for Year Two
Council digital teams are small, and the person who learned the CMS during the project may not be there in eighteen months.
Specify the operating model as carefully as the build: who publishes, who approves, what expires, how new staff are trained. Ask what support looks like once the project closes, and what happens when the platform needs a major version upgrade.
A site that only the original agency can maintain is a liability regardless of how it looks at launch.
Where Webcoda Fits
Webcoda has been delivering web solutions since 2005, is a certified B Corporation and a Microsoft Partner, and has worked with Australian government organisations including Infrastructure NSW, NSW Justice Health and NSW Health, alongside councils including Newcastle City Council and City of Ryde.
The government practice spans public-facing sites and staff-facing intranets, and platform advice covers Umbraco, Xperience by Kentico, HubSpot CMS and custom builds, so the recommendation can follow procurement constraints rather than a single vendor relationship.
Frequently Asked Questions
WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the current reference point for Australian government digital services and for Digital NSW, and the underlying obligation comes from the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. Many existing contracts still specify WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so confirm in writing which version a quote covers before comparing suppliers.
The build is rarely the long pole. Content audit, rationalisation and integration work usually determine the timeline, and council content estates are almost always larger and less current than the initial estimate. Ask for the content audit to be scoped and priced separately so you can see that effort clearly.
Both work. Open-source platforms remove recurring licence fees, which matters to a rates-funded budget. Licensed platforms can bundle capability that would otherwise need separate procurement. The decision should follow your integration requirements, internal capability and procurement rules rather than a general preference.
Focus on the handful of tasks that generate most calls, and make those completable online end to end. That usually means integration rather than design, because a form that emails a team is not self-service. Measuring task completion and call deflection tells you whether it worked.
Define who publishes and approves content, how new staff get trained, what the response times are for defects, and how major platform upgrades are handled and funded. Council teams turn over, so the site has to be maintainable by people who were not involved in the original project.
Talk to Webcoda
Webcoda is a Sydney-based, B Corp certified digital agency that has been building websites and enterprise web applications since 2005, for organisations including Sony, BridgeClimb, the Australian Federal Government and NSW Health. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so platform advice comes without a single-vendor agenda.
Get in touch to talk through your project, or browse our full range of services and platforms.
