Challenge
The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) decided to revitalise and reform its approach to communication through its 2016 Communication Strategy. The outcomes sought by ABARES from this strategy are to deliver integrated, contemporary and effective communication for its services and products.
Refresh of the ABARES landing page (http://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/) and sub-pages to align with other departmental landing pages and therefore the rest of the department’s look and feel, and increase the usability of this landing page and sub-pages.
Integrate ABARES media releases into the department’s new online media centre. Implement a new look and functionality to the ABARES publications page (http://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/publications). The new design will contain dynamic content regarding recent publications, as well as useful publication data.
Business Objective: Increase and improve awareness, accessibility and usage of ABARES information and data on the ABARES section of the department’s website.
Approach
Amicia Consulting team implemented the new responsive design for ABARES and 4 associated sub sites. These websites were implemented on Department’s existing SharePoint infrastructure.
A new easier to navigate website layout / structure, based on the departmental divisional landing page structure was implemented. Our team delivered an ABARES-centric header– ABARES Government crest, colours (with options based on the ABARES visual identity) and new generic ABARES biosphere – in the page banner. Team also integrated the ABARES media releases into the new agriculture.gov.au media centre.
Amicia Consulting team also implemented easy to navigate design for the ABARES publications that are published for last two decades. This was achieved by introducing dynamic content of recent publications and improve the search capability for ABARES publications.
ABARES and three other websites were achieved successfully that delivered elegant and user friendly design along with simple navigation. Other features include:
– ABARES home content slider
– Static content features
– Key Themes
– Publication from last two decades search and browse features
– Standard content page
– Data integration with other ABARES systems
– News, Conferences and Events
– ABARES media releases
– Contact page
– SharePoint Search
– Compliant with WCAG2.0 AA
Outcomes and benefits
- SharePoint website developed with responsive theme
- Improved accessibility and AA WCAG compliant
- Significantly improve information navigation and search
- User centric design and information architecture