Hamilton City Council website scoops national award

Hamilton City Council has received a national award for its new website, www.hamilton.co.nz.

The site, which went live at the start of April, was awarded Best Redevelopment Council Website at the 2012 Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) Web Awards in Rotorua last night.

The judges praised Hamilton City Council’s website for its clean design and easy to follow navigation, as well as for the use of shared cloud-based systems. These systems enable other councils to come on board and utilise them, therefore allowing costs to be shared.

Hamilton Mayor Julie Hardaker says the award reflects the significant work that staff put in to planning, developing and launching the new site.

“It is great to be able to receive this recognition from our peers and reinforce what we already knew – that we have a great website that we should be very proud of.”

The new website, which cost $265,000, is one component of Council’s wider customer engagement programme. Other components of the two-year programme, which costs $2.3M, includes the development of online services, and redesign of business processes and integration of the technology to support these. Planned new online services include advanced submission-making, dog registrations, property information, rates payments, public places and events applications, and food and liquor licensing processes.

The annual ALGIM Web Awards are open to all territorial local authorities in New Zealand, with awards presented in a number of categories including Best Use of Social Media, Best Use of the Intranet and Best New Feature Website.