City of Surrey

The Client

The City of Surrey is Canada's fastest growing municipality, and one of its most diverse. With a population nearing 500 000, and more than 1000 new residents each month, Surrey is poised to be larger than the neighbouring City of Vancouver by as early as 2020.

The Problem

The City of Surrey's website, Surrey.ca, wasn't helping its residents find the resources they needed, and it wasn't helping the city tell its story. They needed a complete overhaul of their web communications and workflows. They also didn't have a lot of time: about eight months from start to finish.

The Solution

Our work with the City of Surrey began with a full governance audit and a series of recommendations on communication strategy, human resources and organizational structure.

Project Scope

• A communications strategy for web
• The redesign of 4 major web properties (City, Libraries, Youth, Kids)
• Editorial management of 7000 pages of rewritten content
• A governance model change and HR services to develop web delivery team
• The design and launch of an iPhone app to connect residents to city services
• Video and storytelling production
• Development of a photo bank of Surrey images
• Implementation of Open Text Web Site Management
• The setup of an external data centre to deliver the CMS and website
• Creation of 3 educational games for kids that correlate to provincial curriculum
• Migration and redevelopment of a 20,000 file document repository
• Configuration and design of search interface
• Integration of Google Translate to provide site content in 51 languages
• And training of 200+ content authors.

The Results

The new Surrey.ca has been applauded by residents, staff, council, media and stakeholders. But the numbers speak for themselves.

Here are the year-over-year traffic changes since the new site's launch (Oct 4 – Nov 4 2009 vs. Oct 4 – Nov 4 2010):

Visits: 117%

Page views: 344%

Pages/visit: 104%