City of Surrey

The Project

The City of Surrey, one of Canada's fastest-growing municipalities, asked us to transform their web presence. But we didn't just redesign their website – we reinvented the way they talk to the world.

View the site

Our Role

Communications strategy
Interaction and visual design
Content strategy
OpenText build
Hosted solutions
Governance planning

Successes

344% year-over-year increase in page views (2009-2010)
Huge increase in community engagement
Site translated into 50 languages
Trained over 200 content authors
Managed the rewrite of 7000+ content pages
Awarded a UBCM Award of Excellence for Best Practices

The City of Surrey is Canada's fastest growing municipality, and one of its most diverse. But the City's website wasn't telling its story, or helping its residents get the services they wanted. They needed a complete overhaul of their web communications. They also didn't have a lot of time: about eight months from start to finish.

Our work began with a full governance audit and a series of recommendations on communication strategy, human resources and organizational structure. From there, we did pretty much everything else you can think of, including:

Redesigning four major web properties (City, Libraries, Youth, Kids)
Implementing new governance and HR models
Designing and building the GoSurrey iPhone app to connect residents to city services
Video and storytelling production
Implementing Open Text Web Site Management
Creating and managing an external data centre to host and deliver the CMS and website
Migrating and redeveloping a 20,000-file document repository
Configuring and designing search interface
Integrating Google Translate to provide site content in 50 languages

The new Surrey.ca has been applauded by residents, staff, council, media and stakeholders. The site, previously only available in English, is now translated into 50 languages – a drastic improvement in language accessibility that allows Surrey residents of all backgrounds to engage with the site. Our work with the City of Surrey continues.